Vaccine task force defends secrecy

OTTAWA • Members of the government’s vaccine task force said secrecy surrounding their deliberations was necessary as they defended their efforts to opposition MPs Thursday.

The task force, formed early last summer, was responsible for making recommendations on which vaccines to purchase and which Canadian companies to back with funding for research and development of COVID vaccines.

Earlier this week, some researchers and industry experts criticized the secretive nature of deliberations. The task force meets privately and has not released agendas or meeting minutes and has said little about what options it rejected.

NDP MP Brian Masse said other countries are moving faster than Canada to vaccinate their citizens and without more details about what the committee considered it is hard to know why the country is delayed.

“As we continue to go down this road without vaccination there still is just a lack of clarity in terms of public accountability,” he said.

The 11-member volunteer task force includes researchers and former pharmaceutical company executives who made recommendations to the government. The group has released information about declared conflicts of interest, but has limited that to the companies that have been awarded contracts.

Co-chair Joanne Langley, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Dalhousie University, said they knew Canadians had to have faith in the process so they went above and beyond normal requirements when it came to potential conflicts.

“We were overly disclosing any potential interest, normally you would disclose something within three years, we disclose things back 20 years, 25 years,” she said.

Some members removed themselves from discussions because they had been employed with a company 20 years prior.

The task force was slow to post those conflicts online and has not released any information about companies they met with who were not awarded government contracts. It has also not released information about any recommendations it might have made that the government did not accept.

Masse pointed to the U.S. where more information has been released

“I’m trying to get my head around why the United States can publish its conclusions, its agenda can be on a webcast and we can’t have any of that.”