Canada has more than enough booster shots. Why is getting them into arms taking so long?

Why are Canadians once again living under the kind of public-health measures – school closings; restaurant shutdowns – they thought were history? The answer is threefold:

To slow the speed of the virus, to avoid overwhelming the health care system by stretching millions of infections over a longer period of time, and to use that extra time to vaccinate more people – with first shots, pediatric shots and above all booster shots.

As Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore put it on Thursday, today’s emergency public-health measures are about “giving us the crucial time we need to accelerate our booster dose rollout.”

That’s been the plan since mid-December, across Canada. The more booster shots go into arms, and the faster they do, the fewer people are going to end up in hospital. It’s just that simple.

So why is what should be the biggest and most urgent vaccination campaign yet moving at such a leisurely pace?

The vast majority of Canadians want their booster, and they want it yesterday. And Canada has enough doses to give it to all of them.

Yet the system for getting available vaccines into willing arms isn’t much further ahead of where it was the week before Christmas.

The number of daily Omicron infections draws a curve that looks like a hockey stick. The curve of new booster shots? It looks more like a mason’s level. Omicron didn’t take a two-week holiday, but our vaccination efforts did.

Some provinces are taking the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” approach.

What happens next with Omicron? That’s up to us

We have the tools to beat Omicron. Use them

In British Columbia, most people aren’t eligible for a booster until they’re at least six months beyond their second shot, and you have to wait for the government to send you a personal invitation. You’ll get one, eventually.

Ontario has gone for the Hunger Games approach: She who best works the phones, the internet and the queues, wins. Everyone over 18 is eligible for a booster, with the gap after the second dose cut to less than three months. But the number of appointments isn’t close to meeting the demand. It’s also falling short of the government’s own goals.

On Dec. 16, as the scale of Omicron became clear, Ontario said it would be ramping up booster shots to as many as 300,000 shots a day. It was the kind of urgency most other provinces haven’t aimed for, yet alone achieved. At the promised pace, Ontario could have got a third shot into every eligible adult before the end of January.

Between Dec. 14 and 23, the daily pace of jabs in Ontario actually did more than double. Two days before Christmas, the province administered more than 253,000 shots – nearly 240,000 of them boosters.

But over the next two weeks, the province hasn’t come close to matching that tally, yet alone exceeding it.

Say it again: Canada has enough vaccines to boost everyone. So why can’t governments show a bit more invention in the face of necessity, and start getting a lot more shots into a lot more arms, a lot faster?

Why were so many of the mass vaccination clinics of last spring and summer stood down? Compared with the high cost of once more shutting large parts of the economy, keeping mass clinics open in anticipation of a future need would have been a bargain.

Why are some provinces calling for “volunteers” to deliver jabs? Given the tens of billions of dollars spent paying people to stay home, could we not have spent a tiny fraction of that paying people to do work that will prevent many others from becoming jobless?

Why aren’t we relying more on pharmacies? Canada has 11,000 of them. If they administered an average of just 50 shots a day, that would be half a million boosters, daily. What about family doctors, who in the past were unevenly recruited into, or sidelined from, the vaccination campaign?

As for the push to get first shots into children aged 5 to 11, which slowed in December, it needs to be revved back up. And the campaign to reach the roughly one in 10 adults and teenagers who are still unvaccinated urgently needs to be re-energized.

The unvaccinated may be reluctant but those hunting for a booster could not be more enthusiastic. It’s in their interest, and the national interest, to close the enthusiasm gap – as quickly as possible.

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