National Post (National Edition)
Made-in-Canada vaccines won't be ready until end of the year
OTTAWA • Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to finally produce COVID-19 vaccines on Canadian soil, but the shots won't come until the end of the year and do little to help the country's increasingly stalled vaccine efforts.
Trudeau announced two deals Tuesday, one with vaccine manufacturer
Novavax and another with a Canadian company Precision Nanosystems.
Novavax will produce their COVID-19 vaccine at an under construction National Research Council's facility in Montreal. Precision, a Vancouver company, will receive $25.1 million to build a new facility that will be capable of manufacturing vaccines and other medicines.
But neither of those two companies will be ready to make vaccines in Canada before September when Trudeau has repeatedly said all Canadians who want a vaccine will have one available. Trudeau said the announcement was about the future of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
“Canada will be developing domestic manufacturing so regardless of what could happen in the future,” he said.
“We need to restore our capacity in our pharmaceutical industry in Canada to supply vaccines to Canadians whether it's for further waves of this virus or if it's for future viruses.”
Trudeau's future goals come as the vaccine rollout in Canada appears increasingly stalled and is now under pressure from European countries who are imposing export controls on vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna.
Moderna cut its shipment to Canada this week by more than 20 per cent. Moderna delivers to Canada every three weeks. A timeline for a second shipment for later this month — forecast at nearly 250,000 doses — was removed from the government's website that provides a forecast of deliveries.
When the Moderna reduction was announced, Trudeau said it would be shortlived.
“This momentary reduction in production is something they have told us is only going to be for this one shipment,” he said last Friday.
Cole Davidson, a spokesperson for Health Minister Patty Hajdu, said the shipment is still expected, but they are being cautious given fluctuations in supply.
“We still expect to receive two million doses of the Moderna vaccine by the end of March, and while the scheduled delivery for the week of 22-28 February is still expected, the decision was taken to remove the forecasted allocations from our web page until final shipment details are confirmed by the manufacturer.”
Pfizer cut its shipment to Canada dramatically over the last two weeks, with just 79,000 doses arriving this week and 70,000 arriving next week. There were no deliveries last week. The company is retooling a Belgium manufacturing plant to ultimately increase production of its vaccine.
After Trudeau's press conference, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne provided more detailed and less encouraging information, including that the NRC facility will take months to bring on Novavax's technology; that the factory then has to be certified, and finally Health Canada has to approve the operations.
Champagne said it's an investment geared to the future and when the plant is running it will produce two million doses a month.
“By investing in Canadian research in bio manufacturing capacity, we are advancing safe and effective vaccines and treatments and we are strengthening our resiliency to future outbreaks,” he said.
Precision Nanosystems doesn't anticipate its facility will be open until 2023 and is designed for a wide array of potential future medicines.
Trudeau and Trade Minister Mary Ng have also had multiple conversations with European officials about new EU measures and have been assured Canada's shipments will not be interrupted. But the European Commission stopped short of putting Canada on a list of countries specifically exempt from the new measures.
The prime minister said he is confident in the assurances European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has offered.
“It's not like a small claims court where you can show a document. The conversations I had with the President of the European Commission were enough to reassure me and should be enough to reassure all Canadians.”
Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole said the delays are proof the Liberals have been consistently behind demand.
“There has never been a plan with this government to manufacture and secure capacity for vaccines. We were late on rapid tests, late on vaccines and each week, the news gets worse,” he said. “Canada is facing a serious vaccine shortfall, rapid tests are not being widely used and Canadians are sitting in lockdown.”
The United Kingdom has been able to push ahead with its vaccination campaign and has significant domestic production that has been scaled up in the last year. Trudeau said all countries provide lessons to learn from and noted the U.K. has fared much worse in controlling the virus.
“We recognize that the U.K. is seeing a much higher rate of infection and course of the disease than we are facing here in Canada. So there are some things that they might like to be more like Canada on, and other things we're certainly going to learn from them.”
In a rare positive development, Theresa Tam, Canada's chief public health officer, said the number of new positive cases has been consistently falling for the last three weeks. She said they have fallen to about 4,300 new cases per day across the country, half of what the number was three weeks ago.
“This is a clear sign that the difficult community-based measures that were put in place to control rapid spread are having an impact,” she said.
Tam said there is still some way to go before governments should reduce restrictions. She said they have to get to a level where local authorities can keep up with testing and contact tracing to prevent another wave.