Toronto to ramp up COVID-19 vaccine clinic operations in response to Omicron One’s pandemic plan, but will still maintain vaccine lab in Windsor
Health officials from Toronto and Windsor are ramping down operations at their vaccine lab facilities but will maintain the lab at the Windsor campus, spokesperson Nicole Corcoran said.
The clinics will no longer be able to provide vaccine doses for patients from the COVID-19 emergency response and related operations, said Corcoran, but the lab’s operation will continue as usual in the face of the national and provincial response to the pandemic.
“We do not have additional vaccine manufacturing capacity at the Windsor lab,” she said.
Corcoran said the Ontario government has approved the clinics’ request for a five-day break from the vaccine operations at the lab.
Corcoran said the clinic at the Windsor lab will ramp up to full capacity over the next week or two.
“The clinics are not going to be able to provide vaccine doses at the Windsor lab, nor will they be able to continue to do so in the week and a half where they’re not able to,” Corcoran said.
“They’ll be able to do some things around the lab while we ramp up production.”
On Tuesday, Health Minister Christine Elliott announced the province is building three vaccine manufacturing sites in Toronto, Hamilton and Hamilton-Waterloo, increasing the province’s capacity from one to three in the next five months.
The site in Toronto will be open for vaccine manufacturing, while the second one opens in Hamilton in December.
The third site will be in Waterloo, Ont., opening in early 2020, officials said.
“This three-site model will be expanded when we need to increase capacity by six, 12, 24 months,” Elliott said at the time.
The Health Ministry is working to develop three more sites to support the expanding province’s pandemic response and will announce where the additional sites will be after the federal government signs off on plans to make more vaccines available this fall.
The provinces were the first and, until now, only province to obtain federal approval to provide pandemic vaccines for pandemic-related emergency response operations.
The Ontario government’s decision
