Jeff Green | Mar 31, 2021


Last Saturday (March 28), the 539th person received a dose of Astrazeneca vaccine at the Sharbot Lake Pharamasave. Sarah Swanson, the pharmacist, has no idea when more vaccine will come to her store. Meanwhile, the pharmacies in Harrowsmith, Inverary and Northbrook area will also complete their vaccination programs by April 2.

The pharmacists were careful about what they said about the program, since they are the standard bearers for independent pharmacies in small communities who were part of the it.
They did say, however, that it would have been easier if the rules they were supposed to follow during the pilot program hadn’t changed every day or two. They also said that when they signed on to the pilot project, they did so for two basic reasons; to make sure pharmacies are not bypassed during the vaccine rollout and, more importantly, to provide vaccine to people who live in their community and the communities nearby.

Because three of the four pharmacies in our region are affiliated with the Pharmasave brand, they used the Medmeapp system for booking appointments

When the pharmacy rollout was announced by the Province of Ontario, everyone in the entire Province who is between the age of 60 and 64 (and a week later everyone 65 and over as well) had access to that system from the Ontario.ca website.

This meant that the demand for vaccine from outside the local region and even adjacent regions, began to flood the small pharmacies.

The Sharbot Lake Pharmasave system ballooned up to 6,400 reservations.

In the end, Sarah Swanson said that she was able to deliver more than half of the shots to people who live in Central or North Frontenac. Other pharmacists reported that about a third of their doses went to people who came travelled from over 50 kilometres away. In Northbrook, Eric Tobia of Tobia’s Guardian, had his own staff handle the booking and they made every effort to vaccinate their own clientele and people from surrounding regions, even through they were getting calls from across the Province.

“I did not want to bring people from red zones into our zone, which was green when we started the vaccination program,” he said.

Most of the people who came from a distance to get shots, at least to Sharbot Lake, came from Ottawa.

CBC Ottawa even ran a story about it.

The Ontario Ministry of Health operated the pharmacy pilot, and the ministry also funds and provides direction to the Public Health Ontario and local Public Health Unit.

Yet the Ministry, un-intentionally created a scenario whereby people living in urban Ottawa, which dozens of large pharmacies at their disposal, were being funnelled to a pharmacy with a capacity of 2 customers at a time, in a hamlet the size of Sharbot Lake.

This directly contradicts the “Stay home, Stay Safe” message that has been the Public Health mantra for 12 months?

The risk that came from people from Ottawa and elsewhere, entering 4 pharmacies in our region, buying some groceries and coffee while waiting for their appointment, is minimal. Hopefully there has been no spread of COVID because of all these visits.

But most risky COVID behaviours bring only minimal risk. For every one of the “super spreader” events we have all heard, there were hundreds of social gatherings that had no consequences.

The principle of a borderless vaccine rollout is a reasonable one, but only if vaccine is available everywhere. In this case it was a mistake.

It leaves all of us who have been avoiding social gatherings, missing out on visits with close relatives in cities like Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, mainly because we wanted to keep everyone in our community safe, feeling like saps.

It also provides ammunition to the chorus of naysayers who would have us ignore COVID and the vaccination program altogether, and let the death rate from COVID double or triple.

No one has died of COVID in Frontenac County and Lennox and Addington so far. We would like to keep it that way.

It would be helpful if the Ministry acknowledged that the pilot project led to an increased risk in small communities and sent out the message that people should get their vaccine close to home.

While they are at it, they should thank the pharmacists and their staff who took on the personal responsibility to ensure that every dose that they received was administered safely, with little or no support from the ministry.

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