How Ottawa botched vaccine acquisition
Stumbles, slips, poor long-term planning
It’s now becoming increasingly clear that as the world mobilizes to immunize itself against COVID-19, Canada is falling seriously behind.
At a time when more than half of Israelis have received the jab, Canada has only two per cent of its population vaccinated. recent analysis by The economist found while virtually all of europe will be fully vaccinated by the end of this year, the earliest Canada can hope for is mid-2022.
And in one of the sharpest rebukes to Canada’s pandemic performance, the federal government has tapped into a global vaccine-sharing pool initially meant for developing nations.
The coming months will reveal much of the failures and oversights that allowed this to happen, but below is a primer on why you’re going to be vaccinated much later than if you were an American, a brit or even Serbian.
QUESTIONABLE CHINESE PLAN
At first, Canada seemed to have vaccine acquisition under control. The Chinese pharma company Cansino had developed what was then one of the world’s most promising vaccine candidates, and Ottawa struck a deal to have it undergo human trials in Canada, with Canadian laboratories free to reproduce and manufacture the shot.
but only days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the arrangement, China shut off all shipments of the Cansino vaccine to Canada in what is believed to have been a spiteful retaliation for the continued imprisonment of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.
SERIOUSLY LATE TO THE VACCINE-BUYING PARTY
Canada is technically the world’s most prolific “hoarder” of COVID-19 vaccine doses. The federal government has signed massive pre-orders for at least six approved or pending COVID-19 vaccines, with the result that Ottawa has effectively signed up for nearly nine vaccine doses per Canadian.
but with many of these contracts being inked after the collapse of the Cansino plan, Canada is lingering at the back of the line on these orders. It wasn’t until Aug. 5 that Canada announced a plan to secure doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and as of this week both companies have delivered a mere 1,157,940 vaccine doses to Canada, with further deliveries delayed.
In the u.k., by contrast, 10 million people have received their first vaccine dose as of Feb. 3, including 90 per cent of the over-75 population in england, which has significantly blunted the deadliness of the pandemic.
This might be a good place to mention that Canada has led the world in per-capita spending related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
REJECTING A PRIVATE SECTOR MANUFACTURING PLAN IN FAVOUR OF A BOTCHED INTERNAL ONE
After the collapse of the Cansino plan, Ottawa poured $126 million into the biologics Manufacturing Centre, an under-construction National research Council facility that, when complete, would be able to produce millions of vaccine doses per month. unfortunately, it won’t be complete until 2022 at the earliest.
In december, it emerged that Ottawa had stuck to this plan despite offers from a Montreal company to manufacture millions of doses by the end of 2020. Pnuvax, a Montreal biomanufacturer, runs a Health Canada-approved facility just down the street from the biologics Manufacturing Centre, and has an established pedigree of manufacturing ebola and pneumonia treatments.
Multiple industry sources told the Globe and Mail that it was indeed plausible for Pnuvax to have been cranking out truckloads of vaccines by Christmas.
Calgary’s Providence Therapeutics had a similar story, saying that although it had developed a vaccine that successfully blocked COVID-19 transmission in mice, Ottawa ignored their appeals to have the treatment proceed to human trials.
YEARS OF ALLOWING CANADIAN VACCINE MANUFACTURING TO ATROPHY
As this pandemic has shown more than once, Canada has outsourced vast quantities of its ability to respond to public health challenges. despite being a leading global supplier of wood and paper fibre, at the outset of COVID-19 we lacked even the rudimentary ability to turn those fibres into face masks.
And so it is with the manufacture of vaccines. The u.s. and u.k. are currently out-vaccinating us primarily because they can make the shots themselves, rather than relying on foreign factories.
Countries don’t necessarily need domestic manufacturing to ensure a good outcome in the vaccine race. Israel became the world’s most-vaccinated country despite not making a single dose on their own soil. rather, their success partly came from striking a deal with Pfizer to be first in line for the vaccine in exchange for supplying critical data on the shot’s effectiveness.
“We convinced them that if they give their vaccine to us first, we will know exactly how to administer it in the shortest time possible — and this is precisely what happened,” Israeli Health Minister yuli edelstein said in a statement last month.
It is unclear if Israel paid extra for the doses, or if Prime Minister benjamin Netanyahu’s close relationships with the heads of Pfizer and Moderna also helped secure the doses.
When it comes to mass-vaccinating a novel disease, your country can either get good at making shots or buying shots — and Canada has failed at both.