Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada will get up to 249,000 doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine before Christmas.

Health Canada is set to approve the vaccine from American-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech for use in Canada within days, and Trudeau says the first shipment of doses could arrive next week.

“This is the largest mobilization of vaccines in Canada’s history, and being able to start with a small number and rapidly scale up as the flow of vaccine doses starts increasing quite rapidly – this is a good thing,” Trudeau said

Trudeau says this first batch of vaccines – while relatively small – will allow provinces and territories to work through any kinks in the system before millions of doses come in the first three months of 2021. All told, the federal government bought 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, and it has the option to buy 56 million more doses.

Shipments, he says, will continue to arrive into January, with Canada set to receive four million doses of the Pfizer vaccine by March – enough to inoculate two million people with two doses each.

“It has been a difficult year, and we are not out of this crisis yet,” Trudeau added. “But now, vaccines are coming.”

These Pfizer vaccine will be delivered directly to 14 distribution centres that have been equipped with the necessary cold storage as the vaccine has to be stored at temperatures below -70 C.

Health Canada is also reviewing three other vaccine candidates – including one from Moderna, which is set to deliver two million doses to Canada in the first quarter of 2021.

The National Advisory Committee on Immunization recommends that these first doses go to residents and staff of long-term care homes and adults 80 years of age or older – people most at risk of contracting COVID-19 and developing severe symptoms.

That will be the case in British Columbia, as noted by Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, who expects immunizations to begin in the first week of January. She also noted that she expects all British Columbians who want a COVID-19 vaccine to be able to get it by Sept. 2021.

“Once we have more vaccine available, we will be making it available to all of us in British Columbia,” Henry said. “That’s when we can get to that point of managing and controlling this pandemic. All of our planning constructs is to have everybody done by September of next year.”

B.C. is expected to reveal its vaccine roll-out plan this week. Henry previously noted that she does not expect immunization against COVID-19 to be mandatory in the province, but she will be strongly recommending that workers in certain industries that have been hard hit get immunized.

– With files from The Canadian Press