Canada's First COVID-19 Vaccine Shipment Could Arrive 24 Hours After It's Approved

Once a COVID-19 vaccine in Canada is approved, we won’t have to wait long for it. That’s the message coming from one executive, who suggested the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine candidate could be delivered within just one day.

Speaking to the CBC on Sunday, December 6, Sean Marett confirmed that it’s possible to ship the vaccine within just 24 hours of approval.

Marett is the chief business and chief commercial officer of BioNTech, a company involved in developing one of the most promising candidates.

“If I use the U.K. as an example, we got approval at 1:00 am... We approved [the] release of the vaccine and shipped it within 24 hours,” he explained.

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Certainly from the discussions that we've had, Canada is in a good position to approve the vaccine shortly. Sean Marett

He went on to confirm that Canada is in a “good position” to move forward with approving the candidate, a message backed-up by Major-General Dany Fortin, a Public Health Agency official.

Fortin also revealed over the weekend that the agency is preparing for vaccine doses to arrive in Canada “early in the new year.”

According to Marett, the process is pretty speedy once the company has been given the go-ahead from health officials.

"Upon approval, we then release the vaccine and then it is shipped. We've already produced the vaccine and reserved doses for Canada," he added.

That said, the BioNTech executive admitted that rolling out the shot is far from simple. In fact, he called the distribution process the "biological equivalent of a moon landing."

Despite this, Marett noted that the roll-out process in Britain went “pretty smoothly,” when the country became the first in the world to approve it this week.