Government expecting 855,000 delayed Moderna vaccine doses this week

The federal government is expecting Moderna to make good this week on a previously promised batch of 855,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses that were expected last week.

Those delayed doses, along with a little more than one million shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, make up the extent of Canada's expected vaccine deliveries this week.

Maj.-Gen. Dany Fortin, the military officer overseeing the federal government's vaccination distribution effort, has blamed the Moderna delay on a "backlog with quality assurance."

Officials have indicated there could be a similar delay in the delivery of 1.2 million doses from Moderna next week.

In comparison, Pfizer-BioNTech has been consistently delivering more than one million shots to Canada each week for more than a month.

The Public Health Agency is not expecting any shots of the AstraZeneca-Oxford or Johnson & Johnson vaccines this week.