Roots of inoculation challenges stretch back decades
Lack of domestic production has led to a ‘race against time.’ It didn’t have to be this way
OTTAWA—It could have been different. Brad Sorenson is convinced of that.
The founder of the Calgary vaccine development firm Providence Therapeutics believes Canada would be closer to a made-at-home vaccine for COVID-19 if only the federal government had taken him seriously.
Last March, when the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, Sorenson said he flagged to Health Canada that his firm had designed two potential inoculations for the coronavirus. With a grant of about $35 million, Sorenson said, Providence could have sped towards clinical trials; with $54 million, it could have moved to secure raw materials to produce five million doses.
Instead, he said its work stalled through last summer as it waited for a response from Ottawa. By October, after the federal government signed supply deals with a host of foreign vaccine makers — and one Canadian firm in Quebec City — Providence had received government grants of up to $8.2 million, he said. The company, with 20 employees, pushed ahead using mostly its own resources and started clinical trials on one vaccine in late January.
“We would have been farther along if they would have just told us, ‘No, we’re not going to support you,’ ” Sorenson told the Star. The uncertainty “just freezes you up as a company,” he said.
“I’m tired of just playing on expectations and leaving it in the hands of the international community to allow us to import vaccines.”
Every day for weeks, with no made-in-Canada vaccines ready to go, the Liberal government has faced questions about its provision of doses from abroad.
As of Friday, Canada lagged behind 35 other countries — including Group of 7 allies like the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the United States — for vaccinations delivered per capita.
The cost can be measured in COVID-19 case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. In the last two weeks alone — when Pfizer and Moderna cut back shipments bound for Canada — nearly 2,000 people died.
The “cries for vaccine are overwhelming,” said Rick Hillier, the retired general heading up Ontario’s vaccine operation, now that Canadians have “the perception that the world is getting and we’re not.”
With variants beginning to circulate in Canada, he said, “it’s a race against time.”
The pertinent question — politically for the government, and crucially for the health of the country — is whether Canada could have been further ahead in that race.
In June, the government’s COVID-19 “vaccine task force” met — virtually — for the first time. The panel of professors, scientists, pharmaceutical executives and business people had been quietly tapped to sift through a sea of vaccine candidates and recommend the best to Ottawa, its existence kept secret for weeks to wall its members off from lobbying efforts.
By the end of the meeting, the panellists had decided on the broad strategy, said Canadian Institute for Advanced Research CEO Dr. Alan Bernstein: diversify supply by ordering different types of vaccines from the strongest possible candidates.
This strategy resulted in Canada securing up to 400 million vaccine doses from seven manufacturers. By the end of September, Canada has contracted to receive 70 million doses of the two vaccines approved so far, from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna — enough for 35 million people to get the required two doses. So far, vaccines are approved for use only in those aged 16 and older.
But the vast bulk of Canada’s immense vaccine supply is slated to come from production facilities in Europe.
That has already led to delays. Pfizer reduced shipments by hundreds of thousands of doses over at least five weeks — including one week in which it sent none — while it curtailed production to increase capacity at its Belgium facility. Moderna, a much smaller U.S.-based company that has scrambled to scale up, followed by sending 50,000 fewer doses than expected from its factory in Switzerland in the first week of February. Questions remain about whether export controls for vaccines imposed by the European Union could affect Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has insisted that they won’t, based on reassurances from EU leaders, but Procurement Minister Anita Anand said Thursday that she doesn’t know why Canada isn’t on the bloc’s exemption list for the controls.
That’s led to a scramble for alternative sources.
Weeks ago, Hillier says he heard several American states were not using up their full allocations of vaccines, and there were supplies sitting in a Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., so Premier Doug Ford phoned the CEO of Pfizer in an attempt to buy them. Hillier said he was ready to take a plane to pick them up, but Pfizer told Ford that “the U.S. administration wouldn’t allow vaccine to be exported. That’s a massive obstacle.”
The Trudeau government still boasts it has secured contracts for the most vaccines of any country. Those deals, signed in August and September, followed the collapse of a deal with CanSino Biologics Inc., a Chinese company that was partnering with researchers at Dalhousie University for a clinical trial of its vaccine candidate. As iPolitics reported, it was clear within days of the announced partnership in May that the arrangement was falling apart and China ultimately refused to send supplies of the vaccine to Canada.
Hillier is reluctant to lay blame at this stage, but believes more could have been done to ensure Canada had its own vaccine supply. “I’m no expert,” he said, “but I think we could have produced and produced quickly. I refuse to believe the private sector in Canada could not do that. There’s no doubt. This is what they do.”
The government says that’s not so.
Anand says during negotiations last summer, she pressed manufacturers to make their vaccines here. None was willing, she said, having concluded the biomanufacturing capacity “was too limited to justify the investment of capital and expertise to start manufacturing in Canada.”
AstraZeneca Canada spokesperson Carlo Mastrangelo confirmed to the Star that his company decided the best way to “ensure timely Canadian supply” of its vaccine was to use existing supply chains outside Canada.
Pfizer Canada’s director of corporate affairs, Christina Antoniou, declined to comment on the company’s discussions with the government, but said by email that “manufacturing mRNA vaccines is indeed complex, requires very specific infrastructure and ramping up for this type of production can take some time.”
Bernstein says the vaccine task force came to the same conclusion after looking at Canadian vaccine candidates. The panel put the highest priority on speed and the capacity to perform clinical trials and mass-produce vaccines — scores on which the Canadian candidates fell short, he said.
“Our mandate was clear,” he said. “Which ones are likely to be ready as fast as possible for Canada? Plain and simple.”
So how did it come to this? “What you’re looking at is a country that can’t respond quickly to make a human vaccine,” said Earl Brown, an emeritus professor of virology at the University of Ottawa.
In November, Trudeau first acknowledged the lack of domestic capacity was a problem and meant that once vaccines were approved, Canadians might not be first in line to get them.
The government says the problem dates back to a Progressive Conservative government’s decision in the 1980s to sell off the publicly owned Connaught Laboratories, once a player in some of the biggest medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, including the development of penicillin and polio vaccines.
“Within 10 years, Canada’s domestic biomanufacturing ecosystem had eroded,” Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne told MPs this week.
Other shoes began to drop after the Harper government changed how Ottawa funded research and development programs, replacing a program that included life sciences and advanced manufacturing with one that focused on aerospace and defence.
Champagne says several vaccine makers left Canada or closed manufacturing or research facilities during this period: AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Teva, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Meyers, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline.
When the Trudeau Liberals took power in 2015, they replaced the Conservatives’ funding program with one that included biomanufacturing once again. But, as one official said, “the damage was already done.
“The big multinationals had essentially spent the last 10 years realigning their global production, scaling down their Canadian presence or shifting it away from manufacturing and towards research. Trying to turn them around after they’ve just spent a lot of time and money exiting is a serious uphill climb.”
The Liberal government responded by supporting companies that might become “anchor firms” in biomanufacturing, including $3.6 million to establish the University of
Saskatchewan’s VIDO-Intervac animal vaccine manufacturing facility in 2018, which has now pivoted to develop and produce a COVID vaccine candidate.
And after the pandemic hit, Ottawa “invested early and significantly,” Champagne said. “I would say that we took immediate actions with a long-term vision.”
Yet last summer, no leading maker of COVID-19 vaccines was willing to license the manufacturing of their product in Canada.
It’s mainly a question of economies of scale. Deputy innovation minister Simon Kennedy told MPs that South Korea has facilities that can handle hundreds of thousands of litres of vaccine, while companies in Canada could produce a “few thousand, 5,000 litres.”
And pharmaceutical companies that were making other vaccines could not or simply would not drop those production lines, officials say.
It is also a question of the technology used in Canadian production facilities.
GlaxoSmithKline produces seasonal influenza vaccines in its facility in Ste-Foy, Que., but the government says it couldn’t simply switch from making an egg-based vaccine to production of a messenger RNA vaccine.
And the government insists no manufacturer was already set up to make messenger RNA-based vaccines — a point Providence’s president Sorenson says it got no help with.
Since the pandemic hit, Ottawa has put money into building up domestic vaccine production capacity — at least $435 million to various biopharmaceutical facilities, including $173 million to help Quebec’s Medicago accelerate construction of a new plant to make its vaccine candidate in Canada. Some of that is paying off. Trudeau announced this week that Novavax, one of the leading manufacturers of another vaccine candidate under review by Health Canada, has agreed to produce its vaccine — up to two million doses monthly — in Canada. But that won’t start until the end of 2021 at the earliest, by which time Trudeau has promised the national COVID-19 vaccination campaign will be over.
For Sorenson, the head of Providence in Calgary, building this capacity is a good idea, even if it won’t be ready until after Ottawa’s self-imposed deadline to vaccinate the population. He wrote an open letter to Trudeau this week saying as much. Variants of the virus are already threatening, and it’s possible coronavirus shots will be needed in the coming years to protect against them. Having a made-in-Canada supply is good policy, he said. This pandemic has proven that. He just wishes it had happened sooner.