Vaccine task force defends its adopted shroud of secrecy

Critics say they deserve answers on delays

OTTAWA • Members of the government's vaccine task force said secrecy surrounding their deliberations was necessary as they defended their efforts to opposition MPs Thursday.

The task force, formed early last summer, was responsible for making recommendations on which vaccines to purchase and which Canadian companies to back with funding for research and development of COVID vaccines.

Earlier this week, some researchers and industry experts criticized the secretive nature of deliberations. The task force meets privately and has not released agendas or meeting minutes and has said little about what options it rejected.

NDP MP Brian Masse said other countries are moving faster than Canada to vaccinate their citizens and without more details about what the committee considered it is hard to know why the country is delayed.

“As we continue to go down this road without vaccination there still is just a lack of clarity in terms of public accountability,” he said.

The 11-member volunteer task force includes researchers and former pharmaceutical company executives who made recommendations to the government. The group has released information about declared conflicts of interest, but has limited that to the companies who have been awarded contracts with the government.

Co-chair Joanne Langley, an infectious disease physician and researcher at Dalhousie University, said they knew Canadians had to have faith in the process so they went above and beyond normal requirements when it came to potential conflicts.

“We were overly disclosing any potential interest, normally you would disclose something within three years, we disclose things back 20 years, 25 years,” she said.

On the government's web page about the disclosures, some members removed themselves from discussions because they had been employed with a company 20 years prior, another excused themselves because they own $500 in a company's stock.

The task force was slow to post those conflicts online and has not released any information about companies they met with who were not successful in getting government contracts. It has also not released information about any recommendations it might have made that the government did not accept.

Masse pointed to the U.S. where more information has been released

“I'm trying to get my head around why the United States can publish its conclusions, its agenda can be on a webcast and we can't have any of that.”

Roger Scott-Douglas, the task force's corporate secretary and a former president of the National Research Council, told MPs that companies demanded the secrecy.

“In virtually every case, when we interviewed a bio– manufacturing company, a vaccine company, it was necessary for the members of the task force to sign non disclosure agreements, that was what companies required.”

Mark Lievonen, the other co-chair and former head of Sanofi Pasteur in Canada, said deciding on vaccines so far in advance was a major challenge.

“When we provided advice to the government, the seven candidate vaccines that we recommended, across three platforms, weren't even approved yet.”

The task force recommended seven candidates last summer and into the fall. Two of those candidates are now approved, with three others being reviewed by Health Canada.

Conservative MPs asked about the government's failed deal with CanSino, a Chinese firm that was to test its vaccine in Canada before the Chinese government refused to ship early samples.

Conservative MP Tony Baldinelli asked about the task force's involvement with that deal, which fell apart in early May, just a few days after it was announced.

“It seems to me that we've lost those critical months, that instead of having other recommendations available, that you were just starting from scratch.”

The task force was not involved with the initial decision to partner with the company, but Langley said when they did consider buying vaccines from CanSino later in the summer they rejected the company.

Scott-Douglas said when the NRC looked to work with the company they were further ahead than international companies.

“In the early indications, you will remember that CanSino was among the very leading companies at that point, it was among the very few that was entering phase three clinical trials,” he said.

Lievonen said the task force was never focused on one candidate at the expense of others. He said they knew they had to place multiple bets to have any hope of success.

“All of these were done in parallel, so there wasn't looking at CanSino and then we look at others, we looked at the International candidates and the domestic candidates at the same time. And we reviewed all of them carefully”

The government also announced new vaccine estimates Thursday, adding in new doses that Pfizer agreed to ship earlier in the year than they had previously committed.

Maj.-Gen Dany Fortin, who is overseeing the rollout also announced the government now expects to be able to fully vaccinate as many as 14.5 million people by the end of June, that's up from 13 million the government had projected earlier.

If three other vaccines currently in regulatory review, AstraZeneca, Johnson and Johnson, and Novavax are approved the government is estimating 24.5 million could be fully vaccinated by then.