Lambton's medical officer of health says rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine is the public health equivalent of putting a person on the moon.
Dr. Sudit Ranade told Sue Storr on CHOK (103.9 FM, 1070 AM) this morning (Thurs) that the amount of time, resources, collaboration and testing that went into the effort was massive.
He said transportation and delivery of the vaccine will require another massive effort.
"From a public health perspective we just put a person the moon which is a huge, huge, huge cause for celebration," said Ranade. "Now from a public health perspective, we have to get that person back from the moon, we have to get them back safely which is the planning and delivery of immunizations to a lot of people and that is equally technical, equally critical, equally important, with equal effort behind it."
Canada approved the Pfizer vaccine Wednesday.
Dr. Ranade said there's plenty of appropriate freezer capacity in Sarnia-Lambton. He said Bluewater Health ordered freezers for the Pfizer vaccine that must be kept at -70 C.
"They've ordered freezers that have come, and so that's a storage site that we could use. Lambton College has also been an amazing partner through this, and they also reached out to us and said we have labs and we have some ultra-low freezers if you want to use them. So we always had a plan that we had a place to keep the vaccine. Public health has also ordered a freezer so that we'll have lots of long-term storage capacity."
Dr. Ranade said it's up to the province to decide how the vaccine will be rolled out. He says it's possible Sarnia-Lambton may not get the vaccine in the first wave because hotspot areas with more disease will be targeted first.
-With files from Sue Storr
