CANADA NEEDS A BEAVERBROOK
Trudeau offers no vaccine leadership — only shifting targets, missed opportunities
in the early pandemic fog, mps were briefed by officials on the government’s plans. When can we get more tests so everyone can get tested, the green party’s paul manly asked Rhonda kropp of the public health agency of canada on march 30.
“there are rapid test kits that are currently being tested and we’re hoping to have them available as quickly as possible. they will be a game-changer,” she said, according to documents tabled at the health committee this week.
as it turned out, it took another six months before the government purchased rapid tests made by abbott laboratories and another month before any arrived in canada. millions of tests have now been shipped by ottawa to the provinces but there has been a strange reluctance to roll them out. one source said 80 per cent of those tests are still sitting in warehouses, with provinces slow or unwilling to deploy them.
It has been left to academia and the private sector to shake up the bureaucratic inertia.
The University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab said this week it has partnered with 12 companies to experiment with antigen tests in workplace settings.
A group called Rapid Test and Trace has submitted a plan to conduct a pilot project in Banff, Alta., that would screen 5-10 per cent of the population a day.
How is it possible that 10 months after a top public health official declared rapid testing to be a “gamechanger,” few asymptomatic Canadians are being tested for COVID?
The answer is a combination of political will and administrative won’t.
Governments have so many priorities, especially during a pandemic, that bureaucracies neglect causes without champions.
In his press conference on Friday, Justin Trudeau talked in French about rapid testing being useful in containing the number of cases, especially in the workplace.
But his government has not been a strong advocate. In fact, quite the opposite, given his health minister said she believes rapid tests may spread the infection.
Quebec is typical. The province has one million tests at its disposal and another million on the way, yet it has used just 18,400 rapid tests, preferring to rely on laboratory tests. People should be encouraged to get tested at clinics, said the province’s health ministry advisor.
But only people who are symptomatic will go to a clinic for a test. The point of rapid tests is to catch asymptomatic people who are spreading the disease unknowingly. Proponents argue that, while antigen tests may not be as accurate as lab tests, they do catch the majority of cases when people are at their most infectious.
Routine rapid testing is a route back to normalcy.
Against the best advice of veteran pandemic fighters, perfection has become the enemy of the good.
That sense has crippled Canada’s response in other areas.
Trudeau announced a memorandum of understanding with Novavax on Tuesday, to produce its vaccine at the National Research Council’s biologics plant in Montreal. He was understandably vague about timelines, saying the production facility would be completed this summer and then certified. It was left to his industry minister François-philippe Champagne to clarify that it will be the end of the year before the plant starts producing vaccines — months after every Canadian will have had access to vaccines brought in from overseas (assuming everything goes to plan.)
Manufacturing plants in the U.K. were built in the last 10 months and are now churning out Astrazeneca’s vaccine. Canada could have followed suit, had it not made some inexplicable decisions, including a failed alliance with a Chinese vaccine producer.
The government is now claiming its latest deal as a victory.
To general bemusement, the bureaucracy patted itself on the back for its urgency. Certification usually takes two years but because of the exceptional circumstances of COVID, the timeline has been “greatly condensed,” said an NRC spokesperson. Images of stable doors being slammed, after the steed has been stolen, come to mind.
What Canada’s COVID response has been lacking is a Lord Beaverbrook — a man, in Winston Churchill’s words, of “force and genius,” who swept aside bureaucratic obstacles during another global crisis.
The newspaper baron, born Max Aitken in Maple, Ont., and brought up in Newcastle, N.B., was appointed Churchill’s minister of aircraft production in May, 1940. It was said he found complacency as tempting a target “as a balloon to a small boy with a pin” and made it his job to disrupt the lives of hidebound bureaucrats. The result was a rapid increase in Spitfire and Hurricane production. The 200 extra fighters a month are widely regarded as the difference between victory and defeat in the Battle of Britain.
But where are Canada’s modern-day Beaverbrooks? Where are our gamechangers? When it comes to rapid testing and domestic vaccine production, this has not been Canada’s finest hour.
rapid testing is a route back to normalcy.