India pledges to help supply Canada with vaccines

India will do what it can to get COVID-19 vaccines to Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after receiving a phone call from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Wednesday.

But the pledge comes amid some renewed tensions between the two countries and with Canada wholly dependent on foreign help to get COVID-19 vaccines into Canada.

“Was happy to receive a call from my friend Justin Trudeau,” Modi tweeted.

“(I) assured him that India would do its best to facilitate supplies of COVID vaccines sought by Canada.”

The Canadian summary of the phone call, provided by the Prime Minister’s Office, describes it as a conversation “about India’s significant efforts in promoting vaccine production and supply.”

The official statement from India’s foreign ministry says Trudeau “informed Prime Minister Modi about Canada’s requirements of COVID-19 vaccines from India.”

“(Modi) assured (Trudeau) that India would do its best to support Canada’s vaccination efforts, just as it had done for many other countries already,” said the statement.

India barred exports of the vaccine in January, but recently released a list of 25 countries where it has authorized exports to this month. Canada is not on that list, but Canada also was not scheduled to get any doses of AstraZeneca until April. Health Canada has not yet approved that vaccine for use.

Anshuman Gaur, India’s deputy high commissioner in Canada, said in an interview with The Canadian Press Wednesday that Modi “reacted positively” to Trudeau’s request but did not go so far as to say it would be fulfilled.

“Our prime minister has assured that we will do our best to meet those requirements that Canada has,” Gaur said. “This is a very positive development.”

The phone call was scheduled after Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau spoke to his Indian counterpart, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, on Feb. 5.

That same day, Conservative health critic Michelle Rempel Garner asked Procurement Minister Anita Anand at a House of Commons committee if she or Trudeau had called Modi about getting vaccines from there.

Anand said she had not but didn’t know if Trudeau had.

“I was actually really surprised they hadn’t done that yet,” Rempel said in an interview Wednesday.

Rempel Garner said she was “encouraged to see the tweet” from Modi, but remains concerned about Canada’s total reliance on foreign production to get COVID-19 vaccines.

Anand said last week she had approached all seven companies with which Canada signed a vaccine deal to see if they would be interested in making some doses in Canada. AstraZeneca signed an agreement with the Serum Institute of India last June to make up to one billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine for low- and middleincome countries.