Vaccine makers all pass on offer to make product in Canada

OTTAWA — Procurement Minister Anita Anand said she tried to entice all of the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to make their product here at home, but Canada didn’t have the facilities they needed.

Speaking at the House of Commons industry committee, Anand said she asked all seven of the firms providing vaccines to Canada to consider making them here, but Canada’s facilities were simply too small.

“Manufacturers concluded that biomanufacturing capacity in this country, at the time of contracting last August and September, was too limited to justify the investment of capital and expertise to start manufacturing in Canada,” she said.

None of the seven deals Canada has signed for vaccines includes significant homegrown production. The government announced a deal earlier this week with Novavax to make its vaccine in Montreal, but that is unlikely to start before December. Medicago, the one Canadian company in the vaccine portfolio, will make most of their vaccines in the U.S.

NDP Don Davies questioned Anand on whether the government had really pushed hard enough to look at making vaccines here in Canada.

“Countries like Mexico, Australia, Japan, South Korea, India and others have done so and are producing AstraZeneca vaccines domestically,” he said. “Did Canada seek this right?”

Anand said getting an agreement with AstraZeneca wasn’t the issue, it was about having what was necessary to make vaccine here.

“The reality is that standing up new manufacturing of a vaccine requires expertise. It requires resources from the supplier and given the scarcity of resources, suppliers emphasized locations that had existing capacity and would be able to manufacture quickly.”

Several MPs asked why the government hadn’t done more to increase Canada’s domestic manufacturing capability in the last year, particularly when compared to efforts in the United Kingdom.

Simon Kennedy, a deputy minister in the industry department, said the U.K. was simply much further ahead when the pandemic began.

“The U.K. has very large contract manufacturing operators that were capable of quickly shifting to produce COVID vaccine,” he said. “The U.K. certainly pivoted, and was able to do manufacturing domestically but they were starting from a much higher base.”