TORONTO - An Ontario Health Ministry official says the province's health units are spending the weekend training staff and putting plans in place to roll out H1N1 vaccinations Monday.
Spokesman Kevin Finnerty said about 700,000 doses of the vaccine arrived at health units across the province by the end of Friday.
"We have been moving day and night to get the vaccine into the health units, which has now been done," he said.
"And health units are working night and day now to train their staff to get ready to immunize priority groups set for Monday."
Meanwhile, a Quebec school hit by the second wave of the H1N1 virus prompted the local health department to begin vaccinating its health-care workers Saturday instead of Monday as a precautionary action.
Finnerty said news of the Quebec scare and U.S. President Barack Obama's declaration of an H1N1 national emergency Saturday do not affect Ontario's course of action because the province is already acting with a sense of urgency.
Finnerty said those announcements reinforce the need to "keep doing what we're doing."
"Today's declaration by President Obama allowed for the usual federal funding rules to be short-circuited, so that funding and other things can move through the states more quickly," Finnerty said.
"We don't need to do things like that in Ontario... We're able to take those steps without having to invoke emergency legislation."
Priority groups that will be eligible for vaccination Monday include health-care workers, adults 65 and under with chronic health conditions, pregnant women, healthy children six months to under five years old, and people in remote or isolated communities.
Finnerty said the rest of the province should be able to receive the vaccine in early November, depending on when additional shipments, expected next week, arrive in the province.
