OTTAWA -- Family doctors will begin administering the COVID-19 vaccine to Ottawa patients soon.
The city of Ottawa will receive 11,000 doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine next week, which will be distributed to physicians at select community health centres and family health teams.
"It's a bonus to see AstraZeneca arriving in Ottawa," said Anthony Di Monte, Ottawa's general manager of emergency and protective services.
On Thursday, the Ontario government announced 34 Ottawa pharmacies will be administering the AstraZeneca vaccine.
The 11,000 doses Ottawa is receiving is in addition to the COVID-19 vaccines going to pharmacies.
"It's above and beyond what we're doing in all our clinics and all the other challenges we're targeting, so that's very positive news," said Di Monte.
More details on the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine with physicians will be announced shortly.
The city has only received the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna doses so far. As of Wednesday night, the city had administered 145,787 doses of COVID-19 vaccine.
Ottawa and Ontario began booking COVID-19 vaccination appointments for residents over the age of 70 on Monday. Within hours, all available appointments were booked in Ottawa until April 7.
"The amounts of vaccine we receive from the province fluctuates from week to week, and as such we're allocating doses over two-week operational periods to bring some predictability to the appointment availability across the community clinics and other delivery models," said Di Monte.
"We continue to work with the province to secure more vaccine supply and open new booking appointments in the provincial system and we expect more appointments will be available soon."
