OTTAWA MADE RIGHT MOVE ON COVAX.
While the Trudeau government continues to face heat over its botched acquisition of COVID-19 vaccines, it’s facing a bum rap over its recent decision to tap into the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) program. According to critics, the Canadian government is all but stealing vaccine doses meant for the world’s poorest countries.
It’s true that the principal beneficiaries of COVAX — an initiative of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), the World Health Organization and the Coalition for epidemic Preparedness Innovations that’s designed to facilitate the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines and other treatments — are expected to be developing countries. However, rich countries such as Canada, which has paid $220 million into the program, have every right to tap into it.
In the words of Seth berkley, CEO of GAVI, writing in September 2020: “For the wealthiest self-financing countries, some of which may also be negotiating bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers, it serves as an invaluable insurance policy to protect their citizens, both directly and indirectly.”
Part of the problem is mixed messaging from COVAX. In a press conference on Friday, berkley criticized Canada’s use of COVAX. While acknowledging that it was pitched to rich countries as an insurance policy, he implied that if they actually used it, it would leave less vaccine doses available for poor countries.
This is more than a bit disingenuous. If a program is billed as an insurance scheme, you can’t then balk when a country cashes in on its insurance, especially when it has paid a hefty chunk of change to buy into it in the first place. In other words, while there is a lot to criticize about the Trudeau government’s handling of the pandemic, tapping into COVAX is not one of them.
With a limited number of vaccine doses presently in existence around the world, getting a larger number of them for any one country will mean that fewer doses will be available for other countries. Whether anyone likes it or not, it’s a zero sum game at present, which is why vaccine nationalism is breaking out everywhere. The european union is restricting the export of vaccines made within its borders, and u.s. President Joe biden has similarly implemented an “America first” policy for vaccines produced at plants in the united States.
Canada has every right to secure vaccine in the pursuit of a “Canada first” policy. Indeed, failing to do so out of a misplaced moral conviction that this would hurt the world’s poor would be doing a great disservice to Canadians, whose interests always have to come first.
unlike the u.s. and the eu, Canada has no domestic manufacturing capacity for COVID-19 vaccines at present. It does not therefore have the option of either to sequester vaccine doses for domestic use, as the Americans and europeans do. Given the tardy arrival of contracted vaccine doses under existing bilateral deals, the only responsible course of action for the Canadian government was to do exactly what it did.
There is a further misconception that the Trudeau government has been negligent by failing to reach out to the country that has the world’s largest capacity to produce vaccines — India. Conservative MP and shadow health minister, Michelle rempel Garner, pointedly asked Anita Anand, minister of public services and procurement, whether she or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had picked up the phone and called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi regarding sending vaccines to Canada. beyond a bland “no,” Anand had no explanation to offer, and obviously wasn’t well briefed.
The Serum Institute of India (SII), Astrazeneca’s Indian partner and the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, is currently contracted to only produce vaccines for India, the developing world and COVAX. Similarly, SII’S agreement with Novavax, a u.s. pharmaceutical company, to produce its COVID-19 vaccine requires it to be made available only to developing countries and precludes sales to rich countries.
SII’S CEO, Adar Poonawalla, has made it clear that his company has no plans to divert shipments intended for developing countries to rich ones, and he doesn’t foresee this happening for another six months to a year. However, SII recently entered into an agreement with the Canadian pharmaceutical company Verity Pharma, to pursue regulatory approval for the Astrazeneca vaccine in Canada, but it’s not clear if, or when, any SII doses may actually arrive. India’s government has a veto on any such commercial export agreements, which it exercised to temporarily block sales to brazil.
Canada must remain vigilant and opportunistic, and score vaccine doses wherever they become available, however it can. In the middle of this crisis, it’s every country for itself.