| I'm not sure I buy this (about Canada). Israel was one of the first to vaccinate most of their population - and they are a tiny country with no domestic manufacturing of the vaccines. Although Israel quite openly stated they paid a premium to get early access to vaccines. So basically, it was simply a question of commercials, and ponying up the cahs. Singapore did likewise - basically bought out every vaccine they could on the open market, and rushed to vaccinate their population. I live in Australia, and it does appear our nation's leaders dragged their feet on the vaccine. Our Prime Minister even publicly stated "It's not a race", regarding vaccinating the population. A letter leaked recently, which showed Pfizer's managing director requesting an urgent meeting with our health minister, so we could get millions of doses. Pfizer was then told that the health minister wasn't available to talk with them, it got fobbed to some underlying in his department, then the deal got adragged out for six months after that - in the meantime, the UK and US signed up: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/12/in-hi... |
Israel was an extreme outlier. It is not a counterpoint whatsoever. Israel got priority first shipping before Canada, and even the European countries that hosted the factories.
Many of these comments are weird in that they seem to hold Canada's vaccination effort as some sort of failure. In reality it was one of the most rapid on the planet, dramatically faster than just about every other OECD country outside of the US (courtesy of nationalizing production) and the UK (courtesy of protectionism), and then testbed Israel.
I'm not sure what you don't buy -- the fact that Canada signed up early and for massive quantities is very well accepted fact. The reality that Pfizer and Moderna's European factories became massively oversubscribed (while US factories were basically off limits to everyone else) is also accepted fact.
[1] - Even if Canada was suitable as a testbed (e.g. it's too large and distributed), healthcare is run at the provincial level. There are 13 sovereign healthcare agencies, and this is constitutionally decreed, so it was unlikely to have been possible even if the country agreed to do it.