Seventy-one members of the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation in Ontario were given expired COVID-19 doses for a month before they were told of the error earlier this week.
In a two-minute briefing Friday afternoon, Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), which administered the expired Pfizer-BioNTech doses in error between Aug. 13 and Sept. 9 in the Georgian Bay community, said it was working on a plan to “customize the approach to reimmunization” for those affected.
Dr. Tom Wong, executive director and chief medical officer of public health for ISC, spoke in the briefing.
But officials refused to answer questions from reporters, saying only they were working with local health authorities before disconnecting from the virtual briefing.
Wong did not say how many of the 71 community members the ISC has managed to reach.
It took the agency a week to tell people in the community they’d been given the expired doses, an error for which the department “sincerely apologizes,” ISC wrote in a letter to the community Thursday.
Extremely concerning that with the amount of checks to go through with these vaccines, this was missed for an entire month. Reeks of negligence.