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Delivery Delays Further Hampering Slow Vaccine Rollout
With hopes that the COVID-19 vaccine would enable life to return to something resembling normalcy, Canada’s slow rollout, now exacerbated by shipment delays, is the subject of much scrutiny.
“A lot of people … have begun to follow provincial and national politics more closely because of these developments,” says Allan Tupper, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia.
A shipment of 208,650 doses of the Pfizer vaccine slated to arrive the week of Jan. 24 was cancelled, and the shipment of 366,000 expected to be delivered the week of Feb. 1 has been reduced to 79,000. The disruptions are due to renovations at Pfizer’s plant in Belgium.
Dr. Allan Tupper, a political science professor at UBC, says leaving town at a time like this is the kind of thing voters won’t forget.
“The public backlash in these things, it’s very difficult to come back from that,” he tells NEWS 1130.
Tupper adds when it comes to Ontario’s Finance Minister, he’s surprised the Premier didn’t fire him.
“It was unwise to leave at all as Minister of Finance. We’ve seen controversies in different countries already, deep controversies about people believing that actions of politicians and other leaders who go away on vacations and clearly violate the lockdown rules and so on to be very, very unpopular by people for good reason,” Tupper says.