MIA RABSON
OTTAWA — Two vaccine developers in Canada say a lack of federal funding early in the pandemic kept homegrown COVID-19 vaccines from moving as quickly as international versions.
Nearly 1.1 million Canadians have now received a single dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
With deliveries from Pfizer-BioNTech now exceeding 400,000 doses a week, Canadian provinces and territories have vaccinated more than 170,000 people since Friday. On Saturday, Canada had its best day since the vaccination campaign began, with 49,707 people vaccinated.
But comparatively, the United Kingdom is vaccinating more than 400,000 people a day, and the United States last week averaged more than 1.7 million daily injections. Germany vaccinated about 140,000 people on Sunday.
All three of those countries invested heavily in domestic vaccine development. The ability to make the vaccines at home has helped them get vaccines delivered much faster.
John Lewis, the CEO of Entos Pharmaceuticals in Alberta, said Canada’s investments were much more timid.
“I think it’s extremely clear that if you look at the success around the globe, decisive and upfront funding of multiple vaccine candidates all the way through to the end was key to both their success and their speed,” he told the House of Commons health committee Monday.
By comparison, Lewis said Canada “took a careful, risk-averse and committee- based decision approach that led to a relatively modest amount of scattered funding for companies in Canada to develop domestic vaccine.”
Canada is buying at least 238 million doses of seven different vaccines, but only one is from a Canadian company — Medicago — and, at least at first, none will be produced in Canada. Medicago is the only one that received direct Canadian support for clinical trials.
Dr. Alan Bernstein, a member of the federal COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force and the CEO of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, told the committee the task force was told to both find the best vaccine candidates available, as well as some Canadian-made ones to support.
Bernstein said the task force looked at 24 Canadian vaccine proposals, but only three had already made enough progress to