Canada’s first COVID-19 vaccine is on the way. How can the social impact world make sure it gets to those who need it most?
Why It Matters
Canada just approved a COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, Toronto’s Black community is getting infected with COVID-19 at disproportionately high rates. Medical inequities and distrust are part of the problem and the incoming vaccine may not be enough.
Canada has approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, and the first shipment of a quarter-million doses could arrive at distribution centres and clinics by the end of 2020, an unheard of record for vaccine deployment in modern medical history. Muhaari A., director of health promotion at Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention, doesn’t believe the vaccine will reach everyone in Toronto who requires it.
HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 are two completely different diseases. But their impact on Toronto, Canada’s largest and most diverse city, might be similar if the federal government isn’t careful. When the HIV/AIDS pandemic arrived in Toronto in the 1980s, it was also a highly complex and mysterious disease that largely affected the most marginalized members of society at the time — LGBTQ+ people and intravenous drug users among them. Later, infections among the Black
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