Waive patents for COVID-19 vaccines, treatment to end pandemic, expert says

OTTAWA — Canada needs to turn its COVID-19 aid attention to expanding vaccine production everywhere or the virus will continue to run wild, mutate and bring new waves of disease, says a prominent expert.

Dr. Madhukar Pai, a Canada Research Chair in epidemiology and global health at McGill University, told the House of Commons foreign affairs committee he doesn’t think rich countries like Canada have learned a thing from the first two years of the pandemic.

“The selfishness, greed and myopia of the richest countries in the world that we have seen the naked display of in the last two years, I’m 100 per cent convinced in the next crisis, we will behave the exact same way,” he said Monday.

In the rush to get a vaccine to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy countries like Canada signed multiple advance-purchase agreements with several vaccine makers in a bid to be close to the front of the line when those vaccines were ready for use.

At the same time, Canada and many others signed on to the COVAX vaccine-sharing alliance, the goal of which was to have wealthy countries help less well-off ones buy vaccine doses. But when vaccines first arrived, initial doses were almost entirely spoken for by a small number of rich countries, leaving everyone else to wait.

Vaccine supplies are no longer an issue, with lower demand in high-income countries and more production everywhere. Limiting factors now are getting the available doses into arms before they expire and overcoming hesitancy which in some cases is fuelled by the fact so many people have already had COVID-19.

Pai said new variants will keep coming if society doesn’t take the needed steps to get more people vaccinated. “Can we afford a Sigma variant? Are we ready to go into another lockdown? We are not.”

Pai is one of several witnesses who told the committee the solution lies in helping make every country able to manufacture or procure their own vaccines.