Post by
Pandora on May 11, 2021 5:44pm
Canadian vaccines
Canada's pharma system at work.
I have not fact checked this but it does sound feasible:
"Why doesn't Canada have a capacity to produce vaccines?" It's a good question, and a critical one these days, and the answer follows:
Canada does have the capacity to produce our own vaccines, it's just that PM Trudeau stumbled and bumbled last year and made multiple bad decisions, ones that should never have been made.
GlaxoSmithKline(GSK) has a vaccine operation in Levis, Quebec, that has been operating for years. Trudeau chose to ignore them.
At the University of Saskatchewan, the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization(VIDO) has been producing vaccines for years. Trudeau chose to ignore them last year and only recently shoved some money their way so they can try to help.
Providence Therapeutics and Northern RNA, in Calgary, had teamed together over a year ago to research, develop, and manufacture anti-covid vaccines in Canada. They offered to help but were mostly ignored. With 'some' ($100-150 million) of the money that the government has spent on covid, they could have licenced in the Pfizer product and been ready to produce filled product when it was approved by Health Canada in December 2020...tens of thousands of doses a day!
Sanofi owns and operates the largest vaccine manufacturing operation in Canada, dwarfing all those above, and is the facility in Toronto that we previously knew as Connaught Laboratories. Mark Lievonen, their previous CEO, built them into a Canadian vaccine powerhouse, providing millions of doses of multiple vaccines for use all round the world. Why some arrangement was not made with them, I just don't know.
INSTEAD OF THESE OPTIONS, TRUDEAU CHOSE:
1...to order product from Sinovac a long with a $2,000,000 deposit, a Chinese company, who quickly refused to send product to Canada so we could participate in their clinical study program. I suspect their reason is because our stiff regulatory requirements for conducting such clinical studies would probably have quickly exposed an inadequate quality manufacturing process, and a failure of the vaccine to meet sufficient efficacy levels. This wasted several months.
2...to use the NRC laboratory in Montreal, where they did research on vaccines for veterinary use. UNBELIEVABLY, from June through to September, Trudeau and his team did not realize, nor did the head of that facility understand, that a veterinary vaccine operation is NOT of sufficient sophistication to manufacture human vaccines. Even with $$ millions in upgrades, which would have taken months to achieve, they would only be able to manufacture small numbers of units. More months were wasted with this.
3...and, following the disintegration of #2 above, Trudeau and his team chose to build a completely new facility, on the NRC property in Montreal, and it is under construction now. A completion date is 'scheduled' for summer, 2021, ..July?, August?, September?. Even if this new facility is structurally complete by September...and when have you ever seen anything run by bureaucrats happen on schedule?...it then has to be fitted out with all the equipment and control requirements to handle vaccines, which will
probably require at least another month or two. Then, every process, every procedure, every piece of equipment, has to go through an extensive 'validation' process by the plant operating personnel and, following that, the entirety of all this MUST be inspected by Health Canada's Biologic Drug inspectors, and every step of the operation must achieve their compliance rating before any product can be manufactured for use in Canada. These steps will probably require several additional months to complete and, if
there is product coming out the door by January 2022, I will be very surprised!
So, when our loquacious PM stands there at Rideau Cottage in the morning and tells us that everything is in hand, and that 'they' have our back, don't believe him! He is just blowing political smoke.