David Staples: The one big reason why Canada failed to hit a home run on vaccines
The United States and the United Kingdom hit home runs on COVID vaccine development. Canada hit a single and is stuck on first base.
There’s one big reason why: our federal government failed to move quickly on procuring COVID vaccines because its leaders did not make Canadian vaccine procurement an urgent national priority, one where failure was not an option.
Contrast that approach with the U.S. and the U.K., where against great odds, their political, business and scientific leaders developed new vaccines and manufacturing in less than one year.
Canada’s federal government failed to organize quickly enough, failed to set ambitious deadlines, and failed to invest the necessary billions in Canadian vaccine developers and manufacturers.
Essentially, we counted on the ambition, hard work, brilliance and goodwill of strangers. Now we’re paying the price.
Canada ranks 55th in the world with 3.5 vaccines per 100 people, with the U.K. at 24.7 vaccines per 100, and the U.S. at 16.8 per 100.
Biomedical experts testified on our failure this week at the House of Commons Health Committee, and I talked at length on the matter with University of Alberta immunologist Lorne Tyrrell, the distinguished hepatitis researcher and a member of the federal COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force.
The old standard was it took five to seven years to develop a vaccine for a new virus, Tyrrell says, but by April or May 2020 he could see progress was moving much faster with well-funded COVID research. “There was obviously a lot of funding put in to vaccine development, particularly by (Operation) Warp Speed and Trump in the United States, big investments in the U.K., and big investments in Germany.”
As the New York Times has reported, the U.S. Operation Warp Speed was the brainchild of Star Trek fan Dr. Peter Marks, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration vaccine regulator. In early April, he sold the idea to the Trump administration of having COVID vaccines not in years, but in months.
Right away a massive public-private partnership mobilized, with the highest level of U.S. government officials, starting with Trump himself, insisting on an aggressive deadline of the end of 2020 for COVID vaccines.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set no such deadline. Canada’s own vaccine committee of industry and research experts like Tyrrell didn’t have its first meeting until June.
Some critics, such as University of Ottawa medical law expert Amir Attaran, allege Canada’s vaccine committee was crippled by conflicts of interests, with committee members having secret ties to potential COVID developers.
Indeed, there’s no excuse for the Trudeau government not making such conflicts of interest public, but Tyrrell says on Canada’s COVID committee itself any conflicts were known and were handled well. Task force members sat out any discussion on a vaccine program they were linked to in some way. “They didn’t make decisions if there was any hint of a conflict.”
It’s worth noting that massive conflict of interest wasn’t fatal to Warp Speed. Pharmaceutical industry veteran Dr. Moncef Slaoui, its chief scientific adviser, had financial interests in two companies developing vaccines, including Moderna, but as the New York Times has reported it was seen as crucial to have people with vast experience in the industry oversee the U.S. effort.
There’s now been a huge outcry that Canada teamed up last May with a Chinese business and the Chinese military on the CanSino vaccine, providing $44 million for this promising vaccine to be tested and manufactured in part in Canada. Infamously, Canada quickly got snubbed by the Chinese, almost certainly due to diplomatic tensions.
It’s fair to wonder why we trusted the Chinese dictatorship on vaccines. But I’ll also suggest the real issue isn’t that we tried to make this partnership work, it’s that we failed to pursue other partnerships early on with equal enthusiasm.
The Liberals have claimed we have yet to develop Canadian COVID vaccines and manufacturing because we lack manufacturing capacity, but Attaran told the House committee that at the start of the pandemic the U.K. was in an even weaker position, with little or no manufacturing capacity, just 200 litres of cell growth culture to make vaccines. Canada started out ahead with 500 litres. “Yet the British stepped up and made use of their limited capacity. They really expanded it.”
Producing vaccines takes billions and the U.S. has put $18 billion into Operation Warp Speed. But even our biggest vaccine research and manufacturing funding announcements in Canada have been in the hundreds of millions, not billions, with numerous companies, such as Calgary vaccine research firm Providence, shut out of major funding. Tyrrell, the founding director of the U of A’s Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, saw his own institution also get rejected for COVID vaccine funding, despite promising early results.
“We have been concerned about the amount of funding that goes into medical and biomedical research in Canada for a number of years,” Tyrrell says.
He points out that Canada spends $1 billion per year on biomedical research and development, while the U.S. spends $40 billion, about four times as much per capita.
Tyrrell says he understands the frustration of Canadians desperate for vaccines. At the same time, he points out that the astonishing international scientific success means we will get safe and effective jabs by September.
“To see vaccine developed in under a year is a tremendous accomplishment. We should be celebrating that accomplishment.”
Yes, we should.
It will just be a lot easier to do so once our arms get jabbed.
Source: Edmonton Journal
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