Vaccines and national interests

It’s been a difficult week trying to determine what happens next with COVID-19 vaccines. Especially in Canada.

U.S. President Joe Biden has announced orders for enough COVID-19 vaccines — including 100 million doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines — to vaccinate all Americans by the end of the summer. The U.S. has been focused on making sure the production from American vaccine plants is used in that country first.

Meanwhile, the European Union has been threatening to track vaccine doses manufactured in the EU, a move seen as potentially leaving the recently Brexitted United Kingdom facing shortages — and perhaps Canada as well, though our prime minister has denied that.

As German Health Minister Jens Spahn put it, “It would mean that vaccines that leave the EU need a permit, so that at least we know what’s produced in Europe, what is leaving Europe, where it’s leaving Europe for, and we have a fair distribution.”

The EU’s decision was to be announced today. Meanwhile, Canada, along with some European countries, is already dealing with reductions in vaccine deliveries from Pfizer as that company retools its plant in Belgium.

The EU is also grappling with vaccine delays from AstraZeneca, which said last week that it would only be able to supply the EU with 31 million doses by the end of March, instead of the 80 million doses the company had committed to supply.

The company’s leadership says the problem is issues in the manufacturing plants that were to supply the EU contract — EU officials have suspicions that AstraZeneca was using doses meant for the EU to satisfy contracts in Britain, something AstraZeneca denies.

(You can be forgiven if you think you’d heard something like this during the pandemic already. All you have to do is to think back to the battle over countries locking up stocks of personal protective equipment early in the pandemic, before PPE manufacturers were able to ramp up production.)

Other vaccine makers have delayed some of their prospective vaccines, and one, Merck, has said it will focus on therapeutic drugs for COVID-19 after poor results with its experimental vaccine.

So things, unfortunately, are fluid. And that kind of fluidity can’t help Canadians, who by and large depend on COVID-19 vaccines imported from other countries.

It’s not all bad news: French drug manufacturer Sanofi, which had been developing its own vaccine, announced that it now has an agreement with Pfizer to produce 100 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.

And other companies are moving ahead with trials.

But it is an unsettling time when big nations and smaller nations jockey with each other for position — especially for a country like ours, with limited manufacturing ability to produce our own vaccines.

The position we’re in? Not the strongest by far.