By Cecilia Nasmith
Had she been wearing a hat as she toured the mass-immunization clinic at the Cobourg Community Centre Tuesday morning, Federal Minister of Public Services and Procurement Anita Anand surely would have tipped it in tribute.
Following a tour of the Maker Lab at the Venture 13 Innovation and Entrepreneurship Centre, the minister crossed D'Arcy Street to tour the facility on the repurposed Cobourg Cougars home ice.
Anand entered through the portals that take your temperature and quietly addressed more than two dozen volunteers who gathered around her to offer a personal thank-you before taking the tour provided by Rotarians Paul Allen and Gord Ley.
Allen explained the process, which begins with workers from the Haliburton Kawartha Pine Ridge District Health Unit providing electronic check-in and enough volunteers to keep everything flowing so that they can vaccinate between 800 and 900 people a day. They'd just done 890 vaccinations the previous day, he added.
“We call this our happy place, where you can actually get together socially and interact with people,” he said.
Many of the plexiglass partitions between vaccination stations have cheerful graffiti, and this surface also offers a place to write down the time of the shot. The big overhead clock that recorded game times for the Cougars is an easy reference point for when the 15-minute waiting time elapses.
“We call ourselves the orange army,” Ley said, referring to the bright T-shirts volunteers wear for easy identification.
And one of their highest points of pride, Allen added, is that from the moment of walking through the temperature portal to walking back out after the vaccination, the people are never alone. There are enough volunteers that everyone served is accompanied every step of the way.
Impressed with the design of the set-up, Minister Anand asked about how they devised the model.
“One of our friends found it,” Ley said.
“It's a model from the Waterloo Health Unit, who just set a record yesterday for the number of shots in a day.
“We took their template and duplicated it here. We have speculated we could do 1,000 in a day.”
“Somebody better call me when you do 1,000,” she said.
One of their initial problems was that people from Toronto were coming in for shots, taking spots they had hoped would go to local residents. That has been resolved somewhat, Ley said, with increased walk-in capacity.
Getting to tour the vaccine room gave Anand a look at one of the few places where volunteers are not allowed to work. She remarked on the 72.5-million syringes she had ordered that are specially designed to get the maximum number of doses out of each bottle of vaccine. The worker loading the syringes confirmed they were getting 14 to 15 doses per bottle.
Anand expressed her appreciation to these workers, and to her guides for the opportunity. Usually when she tours a clinic, she said, they don't let her see the vaccine room because they don't want the workers distracted.
The most emotional part of the tour was next, the southeast corner of the arena where the wall was plastered in colourful squares – sticky notes stuck there ever since the clinic opened, giving each newly vaccinated resident a chance to answer the question posted there: “You are vaccinated – how does it make you feel?”
“It's worth it, just seeing this wall,” Anand declared.
“We have volunteers who come in and do it because they enjoy it so much,” Allen said.
“I would like to do it!” she agreed.
From there, the last stop is the exit foyer where you get your vaccination receipt, take advantage of the selfie station (under the sign that says Poked & Proud or the one that says I Got My Shot) and (if you like) show your appreciation for the work of the Rotary Club by helping them recoup their costs - for a minimum $10 donation, you can take home their sign. Each one (in that signature orange) says “Beating COVID-19 one jab at a time – I got the shot – Thank you volunteers.”
Ley handed her a half-dozen of them as a gift.
“There's one for Justin, if you want to share,” he said.
“This is along the lines with our goal of getting 90% of the community vaccinated. It starts the conversations. It thanks our volunteers.”
“You've thought of everything!” she said.
“We don't know of anyone else doing that,” Ley allowed.
Allen's gift to her was one of the orange volunteer T-shirts, which she immediately put on. It's what she was wearing when she set aside a few minutes to take questions from members of the press.
Asked about supplies, Anand said 95-million doses will arrive before the end of September – 44-million Moderna and 51-million Pfizer.
Looking ahead to the potential need for boosters, she added, “We have contacted Pfizer for the provision of boosters and any enhanced vaccine they may bring to market – that's for 65-million vaccines over two years. In other words, we are very well supplied with vaccines for boosters and potential enhanced vaccines that come to market.”
Hurdles continue, she admitted.
“The reality is, there are continued strains on global supply chains because of the very high demand across the world, across the countries for vaccines.
“What we have done – and I, in particular, have led – is to continue to press suppliers with whom we have a contract to make their deliveries and make it on time.
“This is an every-day conversation. Where are our vaccines? When are they getting here?” she said.
“We continue to press suppliers every single day.”
The payoff is that Canada is number-one for vaccinations in the G7 – though this is also a function of the people who take the vaccine and put it to good use.
“We are extremely grateful to you and to volunteers across the country for making sure the vaccine roll-out occurs the way it should.”
Anand referred to a two-track approach.
One is making sure Canadians have access to vaccines.
“That was the purpose of our contracts at the very beginning of this pandemic,” she said.
The second track was pursued this week with the announcement of Canada's donation of 17.7-million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to COVAX, the multilateral pool-procurement mechanism (where, incidentally, Canada's Minister of International Development Karina Gould plays a leading role in the agency's governance), on top of the $300-million that makes Canada one of the top contributors.
Anand noted that more than one of the heartfelt sticky-note messages she saw reflects how she felt last weekend when the last of her four children got a second shot.
“Eight hundred ninety is an incredible tribute to the work Cobourg and the volunteers from this area are doing to make sure shots are getting into arms,” she said, referring to the total of shots given out the day before.
“In fact, that's what we are seeing across the country. I couldn't be happier to see the vaccines we have ordered being utilized because, at the end of the day, this is the reason we were seeking to procure vaccines and put the contracts in place last summer with the goal of making sure those vaccines will help us see this pandemic through to the other side.”
By the way, she added, among herself, her husband and her children, her family has had all three vaccines in various combinations.
