IF THERE ARE MAJOR VACCINE DELAYS AND MANY OF OUR DEVELOPED-WORLD PEER NATIONS VACCINATE FAR FASTER THAN US, THE TRUDEAU GOVERNMENT WILL HAVE A LOT OF ANGRY PEOPLE DEMANDING ANSWERS.
As the debate over the rollout of vaccines continues, keep in mind that old military aphorism: amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.
That includes the logistics of actually receiving, storing, transporting and distributing the vaccine, of course. Given that many of the leading vaccine candidates require ultracold storage, rolling out doses by the tens of millions is going to be a major logistical challenge, perhaps the greatest in Canadian peacetime history, which is why the government said Friday that Canadian Army Maj.-gen. Dany Fortin will lead the effort.
It's not clear when Canada will actually receive the vaccines to roll out. Facing sharp opposition criticism and public scrutiny, the federal government has promised to begin weekly briefings on the vaccination program.
The first such briefing on Thursday saw Dr. Howard Njoo, Canada's deputy chief medical officer of health, say that Canada is optimistic it will receive six million doses (enough for three million people) in the first quarter of 2021. In an interview on Wednesday, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc was more aggressive, saying January was possible. If so, that would indeed put Canada very near the front of the line.
We'll see how it works out. If there are major delays and many of our developed-world peer nations vaccinate far faster than us, the Trudeau government will have a lot of angry people demanding answers. Time will tell. But there's a specific part of the logistical challenges that is particularly interesting at the moment: Producing vaccines, not simply importing them, was an early goal of the Trudeau government. What happened?
Canada does have vaccine production capability, contrary to what the prime minister said earlier this week. What this country lacks is idle capacity. Even amid COVID, there is still a need for more routine vaccines. Expanding our domestic production capacity — and particularly our capacity to manufacture the new, advanced MRNA vaccines that are the leading contenders against SARS- COV-2 — was an obvious option for the government.
In August, Ottawa announced that a new facility capable of producing millions of doses per month would be built in Montreal. It's being built now and is expected — hoped! — to be operational by the end of July (the National Research Council, in an email, told me Thursday that the new facility remains on target for the July launch date).
It may well be that we could have built it faster. Canada's record on timely procurement and construction is legendarily bad. But it seems doubtful that it would have been feasible to build it much faster — certainly not so fast that it would already be operating. Making the decision to build the facility earlier and taking steps to fast-track the construction would have been great, but Canada was always likely going to be dependent on imports for the first stage of its vaccination effort.
But there's a wrinkle here. There was one existing facility the Liberals were confident could be retrofitted to give us a low-level, but real, production capacity much faster. What happened to that one?
The Royalmount Avenue National Research Council (NRC) facility in Montreal has the capability to produce the right vaccines in small quantities. In separate announcements in March and
April, the government said that it would spend $44 million scaling up the capacity of the facility, so that it could deliver up to 250,000 doses a month, starting this month.
In May, Canada partnered with Chinese biotech firm Cansino to produce a coronavirus vaccine here, but China refused to release the necessary samples to Canada, as part of its pressure campaign against us. That scuttled the Cansino plan, but the facility itself should still be useful, right?
Wrong. At least for now. The government has acknowledged that the expansion of the facility is behind, and won't be ready until the middle of next year. “Through discussions with Health Canada this fall,” the NRC said in a statement to the Post, “it became apparent that the space allocated for the temporary clinical trial material facility would not meet good manufacturing practices (GMP) compliance. The requirements are necessarily very stringent and require a significant investment in time and resources to meet.”
“The existing building requires physical modifications, equipment and all of the steps under the GMP certification and validation process,” the statement continued. “Work on these aspects is underway.” The existing facility is on track to open right around the same time as the government's other facility opens.
There is likely nothing the Trudeau government could have done to have had the new facility ready in time to produce vaccines in early 2021. And it may still find success in importing vaccines from abroad. But if not — if Canada gets few doses, or none at all, well after our allies are moving ahead — the failure to get the smaller facility up and running will be damning.
The NRC told me that the problems with the existing facility only became obvious once work was underway and that makes sense — who hasn't run into problems during a renovation? The difference, of course, is that tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars in economic output didn't hinge on me sticking to my kitchen-remodelling timeline.
The NRC stressed that even if the facility was operating, the capacity would vary based on what particular vaccine was being made. Even at the maximum capacity mentioned, 250,000 doses isn't a lot. With two doses per person, that's only 125,000 Canadians a month — with almost 40 million of us potentially needing a vaccine, that would be an awful long wait.
But even relatively low levels of vaccine production could make a big difference in the near future if we got those vaccines to the right places — long- term care homes, hospitals and into the arms of people with specific health- care challenges. It wouldn't end the pandemic, but it would save lives and make the first half of 2021 less heartbreaking.
The government knew the upgrades were needed in March and April — that's why it ponied up the cash. When the Cansino deal was announced in May, the improvements were still needed, and apparently on track. The government was confident as late as August that it was still set to reach its target of producing vaccines in November.
It's November. There's no vaccine, and no hope of production until late-2021.
Trudeau won't wear the pandemic. He won't wear decisions by previous governments that resulted in our vaccine capacity eroding. And so long as our imports arrive in a generally comparable time frame as our allies, he might not wear any of this.
But if our shipments come later than everyone else's — much later — then the failure to renovate the Royalmount Avenue facility on time may come to haunt the Liberals. That was something that was genuinely in their power to get right. They didn't.