slicing diagonally hoping for cheesecake

In the C19 news, today it was announced that Pfizer will deliver to Canada 249,000 doses before the year 2020 expires. Today also marks a day where a trial run goes ahead with vaccine distribution (using a fake vaccine) in the country to the 14 vax centers (2 each in BC, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, one each in the other provinces).

The good thing about only having 249,000 doses distributed throughout Canada at first is that this helps them to test and refine the logistical steps to get the vaccines from Pfizer to the person being vaccinated. It is especially important for the Pfizer vaccine as theirs requires a constant temperature no warmer than -70C or -80C (I've seen both figures reported in the media). The Moderna vaccine which looks to be approved next by Health Canada requires -20C storage; this is more manageable. I do not know about the subsequent ones; what their requirements are.

The first to get vaccinated will be a combination of the elderly in long term care homes who are most likely to die from catching C19, the workers around them, and health care workers in hospitals that care for C19 patients. There will not be enough doses in December to cover all such people in this first month of vax distribution, but as more Pfizer and other vaccines start to trickle into Canada in 2021 they will be distributed to the population based on these priorities. The provincial authorities will be the ones to decide how, when and to whom, to distribute them.

As C-Ling is immunucompromised in my family, it is possible that I will be a little higher up in the general population queue, which I figure would happen in mid-Spring to Summer. 

I am hoping that my provincial government is reasonably transparent about how this vaccination process is going through the coming months, giving numbers about how many people have received it, how many are left per region and it would be really nice if every Quebecker eventually received a notification as to the specific date/time they are to appear to a vax center.