Waive patents to help end pandemic, MPs told

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, 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.

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 the vaccines first arrived, the initial doses were almost entirely spoken for by a small number of rich countries, leaving everyone else to wait.

As of May 5, three in every four people in the wealthiest countries were fully vaccinated and almost half had a third or even a fourth dose. In the lowest-income countries,12.5 per cent of people are fully vaccinated, and less than one per cent is boosted.

A total of 1.4 billion booster shots have been given this year, almost all in high- and upper-middle-income nations.