‘We were desperate.’ As nursing home employees received the first vaccinations on Monday, memories of the pandemic’s first wave left some overwhelmed with emotion.
During the applause, the celebratory elbow bumps, the camera flashes, Colette Cameron watched through tears as four of her colleagues got jabbed Monday with the country’s first coronavirus vaccinations. Then she removed her suit jacket to follow them herself. “It was overwhelming,” said Ms. Cameron, a registered nurse and social worker, who runs a nursing home in Toronto that experienced one of the city’s first outbreaks. “I wish everyone could have this support so nobody has to feel as alone as we did. We were desperate.” The start of Canada’s vaccine campaign was an emotional one, with the first precious doses going to people from nursing homes: health care workers in Toronto, and residents in both Montreal and Quebec City. That was recognition that nursing homes have been ground zero in Canada when it comes to both Covid-19’s cruel ravages and the storm of criticism over the country’s lack of preparation for it. More than 460,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus in Canada, and 13,400 have died from it. “We have never distributed so many Kleenex boxes as the last few days,” said Sue Graham-Nutter, chief executive officer of the Rekai Centres, which runs two nursing homes in Toronto tapped to receive the country’s first vaccinations. “We have the images of what happened on the floors.” Less than a week after Canada became the third country in the world to approve the vaccine created by the American drugmaker Pfizer and a German firm, BioNTech, the first shipment arrived to a Montreal airport on Sunday night. From there, kicking off the country’s largest largest-ever inoculation program, the boxes of frozen vials were dispersed to 14 sites across most of the country that were equipped with special freezers for the vaccine, which needs to be kept at ultracold temperatures. With a relatively small population of just 38 million, Canada has agreed to buy up to 76 million doses from Pfizer and 414 million doses of other potential vaccines from other companies. Anita Anand, Canada’s minister of public services and procurement, described that as “the most number of doses per capita of any country in the world” at a news conference Monday.
