Canada’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign continues to roll out slowly.

To date, just over 7,200,000 doses have been given to people in this country.

But just two per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated, which amounts to around 763,000 individuals.

Here in the GTA, starting on Friday April 9th, residents of Peel Region as young as 50 will be eligible to book a COVID vaccine.

And in Toronto, people as young as 50 who live in specific postal codes may also register as Mayor John Tory explained on Friday.

“This is part of the big push that we’re putting on to move the vaccination effort into communities that have been hardest hit by COVID-19 using postal codes,” Mayor Tory told CP24, “We have all kinds of data by postal codes that say rates of hospitalization, rates of infection, all those kind of things that allowed us to pick these postal codes, ultimately they will cover off 111 different neighbourhoods in the city.”

In addition, mobile vaccine clinics have started going to the COVID hotzone postal codes to vaccinate people 18-plus, a move which is only being advertised locally.

Doctor Naheed Dosani at the University of Toronto advocates for vulnerable people and says this will save lives, but is disappointed it took a third wave of the virus to change provincial policy.

“I think what we’re seeing in all this is a lack of attention to equity, a lack of attention to those who’ve been hardest hit. Put in more resources and efforts to support low income communities, because that’s where many of our essential workers live, that’s where many racialized people live,” Dosani explained.

These same individuals, he points out, are now contracting the more contagious and severe variants of the virus, and ending up in hospital ICUs.