of Ontario COVID-19 The vaccination campaign roll-out was disorganized and wasteful, the province’s Auditor General has been found to lead to thousands of doses of Vaccination remained unused.
In its annual report, Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysic said the province’s COVID-19 vaccination system favored those with access to better technology, duplicated its functions across different systems, and failed to adequately prioritize areas identified as hotspots .
A central system took three months to develop, resulting in tech-savvy individuals booking multiple appointments and consequently wasting time through no-shows.
Placements were offered by public health units, pharmacies and hospitals. The report said that this encouraged people to participate in “vaccine shopping”, leading to approximately 227,000 unfilled appointments in 2021.
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wasted vaccines
The report sheds new light on vaccine waste in Ontario, with the auditor’s report naming pharmacies and private vaccine delivery clinics as the biggest culprits behind discarded doses.
Overall, Ontario wasted about nine per cent of the vaccines it received through June 2022.
However, the report found that pharmacies were responsible for 70 percent of wastage between December 2020 and June 2022, with the average pharmacy wasting two-in-10 doses they were tasked with administering.
In contrast, the AG found, hospitals wasted just one percent, while public health units wasted four percent of their doses.
Lysyk’s report also points to two private-sector companies that were contracted by the Ford government to provide vaccines that ultimately wasted 20 and 57 percent of the doses delivered to them.
“There was no value for money there,” Lisick said. “Money was paid for services that were not delivered.”
The report said that FH Health, which was responsible for administering the vaccines at nine locations in Toronto, wasted 3,223 doses during the two-month period.
The AG also noted that over the course of four days, FH Health wasted more vaccines than it actually delivered: 488 doses were wasted compared to 95 doses distributed.
“None of the contracts with these private sector companies require the company to reduce wastage or charge the company penalties for excessive wastage,” the report said.
The health ministry told auditors that the province returned more than 4.4 million unused doses to the federal government for donation to the international market and plans to set appropriate wastage targets for distribution centres.
hotspot community
As the Ford government tries to determine which Ontario communities should be first in line to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, the province’s Vaccine Distribution Taskforce has identified 114 hotspot communities as priority areas for the shot. I recognized
Between April and May of 2021, the report found that 875,000 doses of the vaccine were set aside for these high-risk areas.
However, the audit found that the health ministry “inconsistently” implemented the task force’s recommendations, resulting in some high-risk communities not being prioritised.
The report said, “The ministry did not clearly explain how scientific data was used to support their selection of hotspot postal code areas, leaving the public confused as to why certain communities were selected and Others were excluded.”
At least eight postal codes were included despite being at low risk for the spread of the virus at the time, while four areas were excluded despite residents being at high risk of hospitalization or death.
Doctors paid more for vaccine administration
As the province and public health units dramatically scaled up vaccination clinics in 2021, the auditor revealed a huge disparity in pay based on job title.
For example, physicians were paid between $170 and $220 per hour to administer vaccines in private sector organizations, a hospital, or a public health unit.
The audit found that the compensation was more than five times what nurses or pharmacists were being paid for similar work.
The report found that nurses earned between $32 and $49 an hour while pharmacists received between $30 and $57 an hour to dispense COVID-19 vaccines or boosters.
“It was surprising to see the difference in rates,” Lisic told reporters at Queen’s Park.
The government, Lysyk said, said the disparity in pay was due to the government’s decision to pay employees based on profession rather than job performance.
Personal Protective Equipment
The auditor found that millions of dollars worth of personal protective equipment purchased during the peak of the pandemic needed to be disposed of in March because the PPE had either been damaged, expired, or had become obsolete.
Lysyk noted that about $30 million of the $201 million stockpile had to be disposed of, while millions worth of expired equipment had been “written off” by the province.
The AG found that some masks purchased by the province required assembly and were “undesirable”, while some hand sanitizer products once approved by Health Canada but later not recommended by some public health units contained alcohol was.
“Once the supply chain stabilized, some products became more desirable than others by end users, so some products were not used before expiration,” the report said.
The auditor also cautioned the province that it needs to plan to use 100 million units of N95 respirators by 2030 – worth $81 million – or risk phasing them out due to expiration.
The AG said the number of masks will exceed demand by the end of the decade, increasing the risk of wastage of personal protective equipment.