I’m embarrassed by this. Like not helping out your best friend:
Rather than a formal export ban, it seems that the U.S. contracted with vaccine makers for a specified number of doses in return for pouring federal $$$ into vaccine development, and has insisted (under Trump, and now Biden) that those contracts be fulfilled before those companies send vaccines abroad.
The U.K. has blocked some vaccine export to the E.U., and it’s just been reported that the E.U. is blocking AstraZeneca vaccine shipment to Australia.
Canada’s problems can’t be solely blamed on other countries prioritizing their own citizens for vaccination.
"Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, contended that Canada could have begun building vaccine production capacity early in the pandemic. He also said Ottawa could have streamlined its process for approving new vaccines to quickly give Canada more options. Canada, for instance, has still not approved AstraZeneca’s vaccine. “The Canadian government shot itself a bit in the foot,” he said.
A contract where the company can’t export any product until it completely fills all US orders might not be legally the same thing as an export ban, but it has the same practical effect.
Also Canada approved the AZ vaccine like 3 days after the US did. The UK’s quick approval notwithstanding, the regulatory bodies had real concerns about AZ’s phase 3 data, what with the dosing errors and such. The idea that Canada hasn’t streamlined the approval process is just bonkers.
From the beginning of the pandemic Canada has pursued diverse options to secure vaccines, not only ordering enough doses for everyone in the country from several different manufacturers, some of whom aren’t through trials yet, but partnering in the development of multiple vaccine candidates. I think the only major player we didn’t pursue vaccine options with was Russia. Building vaccine production capacity from scratch in only a few months was never going to be the fastest option. But we are actually doing that, too. It’s just not likely to actually be producing vaccines until fall.
The mistake, such as it was, was failing to maintain production capacity 30 years ago when the government was casting about for places to save money.
That’s also on Canadians since i hear them reference “National Health Care” all the time.
@Asuka, your Canadian conversations always remind me of Trump “Sir” stories.
What Canadian talks about National Health Care, with capital letters and all? Nationalized health care, maybe, though even that isn’t really accurate, given that there is plenty of private enterprise involved in the delivery of health care. The usual adjective Canadians will stick in front of ‘Health Care’ is ‘Universal.’ More often, they won’t use an adjective at all. The discussion in Canada is mostly about “the health care system,” which is inaccurate itself (should be plural, not singular) except when the discussion is being held on a provincial level. To be fair, such discussions quite frequently are at a provincial level. The national health care system, insofar as it exists, is simply a system of transfer payments from the federal government to the provincial governments, and a set of minimum standards set out in the Canada Health Act.
Most Canadians are fully cognizant of the fact that health care is a provincial thing, because interactions with the health care system are imbued with provincial flavour in the form of pulling out your provincially-issued health card to receive services. Also because local health authorities all answer to the provincial government, not the federal. If your small local hospital is being closed, it’s the Premier’s fault, not the Prime Minister’s. I mean, it’s also the Prime Minister’s, because they are short-changing your province on its share of the health transfers because [insert local grievance about the formulas here], and if the feds would just ease up on the purse strings and stop wasting money on [pet issue of provinces to the east/west] then the provincial government wouldn’t have to make these cuts, but it’s the Premier’s fault that it’s Springfield’s hospital being closed instead of Shelbyville’s. It would make so much more sense to close Shelbyville’s.
There have been a series of errors by the Trudeau government. For example:
and…
The short of it:
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We could have upgraded the NRC facility and had it producing vaccines by the end of 2020, OR we coild have invested some money in a private company that said they could do it as well. Instead, the Trudeau gov’t spent $170 million to build a new facility in Montreal.Which he promised would be ready early in 2021 but recently admitted that the facility won’t be finished until late summer. And I’d be willing to bet that it will not open on time.
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PnuVax, a private biopharmaceutical company also located in Montréal, applied for funds from the COVID infrastructure fund, saying that if funded they could have millions of doses ready by the end of 2020. They were completely shut put of funding in favor of building the government facility. Because Trudeau really hates the private sector and thinks government should do these things, and he thought the new facility would be online by then anyway… And it’s tough to reward cronies unless you can hand out giant construction projects in Montreal.
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Trudeau’s first choice for an imported vaccine was China. China screwed us over. He should never have put his eggs in that basket.
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Trudeau then spent huge money to buy vaccines elsewhere, apparently without bothering to get iron-clad delivery commitments because we seem to have dropped to the bottom of everyone’s delivery lists despite paying extra to be near the top.
Procuring the vaccine was the Trudeau government’s job. Delivering them once received is a provincial responsibility. The provinces have kept up their end and delivered what they received. The supply end was a complete failure on multiple levels.
I like how an article entitled “The roots of Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine shortage go back decades” is a cite for this being all Trudeau’s fault.
Also I’m somewhat skeptical that PnuVax, which so far as I can tell was not involved in any covid vaccine development whatsoever, could have somehow produced millions of vaccine doses by the end of 2020, which was within weeks of when actual vaccine candidates completed trials. Plus I’d be quite surprised if they could produce the mRNA vaccines at all, so whatever production capacity they do have wouldn’t have come online till the AstraZeneca vaccine was approved just a week or two ago. Also googling PnuVax reveals very little information beyond that they’re being sued by the Gates Foundation for misuse of funds that were supposed to be used to develop a pneumonia vaccine.
And since none of us were privy to the negotiations with regards to contract terms with Pfizer or Moderna, I’m not sure how we can tell if delivery guarantees were possible to get. I mean, never mind that these purchases were being made as the vaccines were just entering Phase 2 trials, the global market for the vaccines far outstrips Pfizer and Moderna’s capacity to produce them. If I’m Pfizer or Moderna why on earth should I sign off on a contract with big penalties for late deliveries because Canada is demanding that? I’ll just sell to Poland or Argentina or someone who won’t demand such a clause and Canada can take a hike. I mean, I should expose my company to massive penalties for late deliveries of a product still in development, in a product category that has never been produced on a large scale before? Why, when I can sell to some other client with no such exposure? That would be betraying my fiduciary duty to my shareholders, is what that would be.
The CanSino vaccine was in the governments plans because it was developed in large part by the NRC. Yes China screwed us over, probably because of the Huawei thing (thanks Trump), but it was first choice because it was our IP and it was ready to test really early on because it was basically a modified SARS vaccine, developed in coordination with the Chinese because of the history of SARS.
And finally the deliveries are ramping up and it appears that the quarterly delivery targets are actually going to be met or exceeded. It’s easy to nitpick the vaccine procurement decisions in hindsight, but it’s not obvious that we’re actually going to end up much behind any countries outside of the US, UK, and Israel when all is said and done.
Vaccine development is a huge financial risk and resource drain taken on by drug companies - because many vaccines fail. It’s a gamble the drug companies will take, not sure a government funded healthcare provider should do the same. The manufacturing is the prize the drug companies get for that investment.
Based on current estimates, we are only 3-4 weeks behind the US in achieving our goal of vaccinating every adult that wants a vaccine. How is that a complete failure?
Considering the fact that we are not making vaccines, in part due to a decades old decision that somehow a 25 year old Justin Trudeau was responsible for, I think we are doing fairly well on procurement.
How do you figure that? As of today, Canada has vaccinated about 6% of the population. The U.S. reached that level in Jan 23, about six weeks ago. But the rate of
vaccinations in the U.S. is much faster, and they are currently at 26% of the population vaccinated.
To get a more recent picture, I took a look at how many people were vaccinated in Canada vs the U.S. in the past week. Since March 2, the U.S. has administered about 2.1 million shots per day. Canada averaged about 75,000. Per 100 people, the U.S. is at about .65 vaccinations per day right now. Canada? .2. Not only are we more than 6 weeks behind, but we are losing ground every day.
The only way we are going to come close to vaccinating the country only 3-4 weeks behind the U.S. is if we miraculously go from the current state of vaccinating about 1/3 of the percentage per day than the U.S. is, we’d have to somehow manage to vaccinate people at probably twice the rate of the U.S.
If you go by current trends instead of the future promises of politicians, we will catch up to the U.S. approximately never. The U.S. has vaccinated a quarter of the population in three months, with the rate of vaccination increasing every month. In the same period, Canada has vaccinated 6%, and Our rate of increase in vaccination is about a third of the U.S’s, meaning instead of us catching up, they are pulling away.
Source: COVID-19 Data Explorer - Our World in Data
In part because of decades old decisions, But in major part because:
A) Trudeau turned down refurbing the NRC vaccine facility or giving money to an existing Pharma facility to make the vaccine, in favor of building a new one in Montreal, which he said would be available in January but now has been delayed until late summer, and probably later.
B) Trudeau initially put our eggs in China’s basket, and China screwed us over.
C) Trudeau then spent a lot of money procuring vaccines from the EU, which has had problems delivering even for their own people, are are now talking about an export ban.
D) Trudeau refused to deal with the U.S. for vaccines, our closest partner, because Trump. He was afraid that the U.S. would close exports because Trump, so he went with the EU - which is now considering closing off exports.
E) Trudeau apparently paid a premium for expedited delivery, but failed to negotiate any sort of hard delivery dates like other countries did, so we went to the back of the line. At least according to my wife who works in health care managing the problem. I don’t have a cite for that, so take it as you will.
Maybe the problems will be sorted, we’ll get millions and millions of doses soon, and we’ll start to catch up to other countries. I’m not holding my breath, as this administration has been a boatload of fail all through the pandemic. As it stands, there are 42 countries doing better than we are.
Because the article also talks about Trudeau’s faults, and the second link I provided goes into detail. But yes,.the failure to have local vaccine development can be partially laid at the feet of previous governments, both Liberal and Conservative. That doesn’t remove Trudeau’s responsibility to get it done.
Why was it necessary to have millions of doses by the end of 2020? We don’t have millions of doses NOW, and the facility competing with them won’t have manufacturing up and running until late summer at best. All PnuVax had to do was beat that timetable. They said they could produce millions by the end of 2020, and we have no evidence that they were lying. But even if they were off by months, they’d still beat the alternative we went with.
As for your suspicion that they couldn’t do it, what do you base that on? Lots of facilities around the world were upgraded to produce the Covid vaccines, some in as little as two months… These decisions were being made last August.
And no,I’m not privy to the negotiations for vaccines, but I am privy to the knowledge that Canada is a first world country that is currently 41st in the world in vaccinations, while our neighbour and closest trading partner (who we refused to deal with because reasons) has vaccinated four times the percentage of their population and is currently vaccinating them at a much higher rate than we are.
At what point do you think Trudeau is responsible for any of this? Doesn’t the buck stop with him? I’m sure if Harper was in power, or if Trump had been turning in such dismal results, the left would be screaming that he was murdering people.
I hope you’re right. I did see that Shopper’s Drug Mart is now taking appointments for vaccines for people over 75, based on the promise of vaccines showing up by March 15.
The government is still saying that we’ll have the majority of the population vaccinated by the end of September, which doesn’t fit at all with Fins’ belief that we’re only behind the U.S. by 3-4 weeks. I assume that’s based on the belief that we’ll get the vaccines we ordered, plus the Montreal facility will come online at the end of July as promised. I’m not holding my breath that a $170 million project in corrupt Quebec will be done by then. After all, their schedule slipped by six months after only four months of construction.
Worst-case scenario: We’ll only get the vaccines at the rate we need after other major countries have vaccinated their populations and demand starts to ease. Until then we might just continue to get trickles here and there. I sure hope that’s not the case, and I’m wishing the Trudeau gov’t all the success in the world in getting the vaccine, because the alternative is horrible. But I try not to let hope win out over experience.
I dunno where I got the bit about millions of doses by the end of 2020. Maybe here?
You’re levying 3 criticisms against Trudeau:
- He should have funded PnuVax rather than the NRC refit.
- He should have tried to obtain US vaccine production instead of just EU production.
- He should have negotiated better delivery guarantees in the purchasing contracts.
You have no idea if PnuVax would actually have done better. PnuVax says they would have. And Tesla said their cars would have full self-driving capability several years ago. I don’t put any more stock in corporate press releases than you do in politicians’ promises. There is however a very good case to be made that there shouldn’t have been a decision between either granting PnuVax funding or refitting the NRC facility. The money involved is chump change compared to CERB. Fund both. If the government didn’t have good reason to believe that PnuVax production wasn’t viable, then that certainly is on Trudeau. As I said, I don’t know anything about PnuVax beyond the only google results on them that they’re being sued by the Gates Foundation for misuse of funds.
The decision about US production was clearly the correct decision. The US has to date not allowed the export of any American vaccine production, and likely won’t until they’ve given out at least first doses to all willing recipients. If we’d banked on US production we’d be even more screwed than we are now.
And we don’t actually know what delivery guarantees were on offer, or that we didn’t ask for any. And in any event, it appears that all quarterly delivery targets are actually going to be met, so how is that even relevant?
Finally, this tired “we shouldn’t be in 42nd!” stuff is, well, tiresome. The countries that are ahead of us are almost entirely countries in the EU, or are UK protectorates (entities like the Falkland Islands, Jersey, Isle of Man, etc often feature separately on these lists, dunno if they do on the one you’re using), or are tiny nations where the absolute numbers of doses are relatively small (Seychelles is apparently second behind Israel, but we’re talking about 80k doses total, for example). There are a handful of exceptions, but this captures most of it. Europe as a whole is only slightly ahead of us. Really, it’s the UK, US, and a handful of exceptions like Israel and UAE that are notably ahead of us.
Honestly, I’m sounding more defensive of the government than I really am. I’m just so fucking tired of the pessimism. We are not going to have to wait till 2022 to be vaccinated. Instead of beating the doom and gloom drums can we please notice that actually Moderna is now projected to meet its first quarter delivery goal of 2 million doses, and Pfizer is actually saying they’ll deliver 5.5 million doses in the first quarter instead of the stipulated 4 million. Pfizer and Moderna, who I repeat are meeting their first quarter deliver targets (albeit in a backloaded fashion), are to deliver a further 23 million doses in the second quarter, plus whatever AstraZeneca can get us, and what J&J deliver, though J&J having production issues apparently. That puts us well over 30 million doses by July 1. That’s not a disaster scenario, even if it is more than 3-4 weeks behind the US.
Oh, and the China thing. Almost forgot.
Not putting any eggs in the CanSino vaccine would have been criminally negligent on Trudeau’s part. The CanSino vaccine was developed from a SARS vaccine that was jointly developed by Canada and China, and had completed iirc Phase 2 trials before being put on ice for lack of any possibility of doing Phase 3 trials what with there being no SARS around for test subjects to be exposed to. It was our clear best shot at an early vaccine. That China might have been predicted to screw us over may be true, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion given the history of cooperation on SARS.
One of the newspapers publushed alleged details of the contract between the federal government of Canada and Novovax. Different countries had one of two legal terms in these contracts.
One term meant, legally, the company must make reasonable efforts to supply the vaccine. The stronger term used meant (with legal interpretation) that the company must make extraordinary efforts to supply the vaccine at any logical cost, unless there were unusually adverse conditions. England and Canadian contracts may have used the weaker term, but England has more manufacturing ability than Canada.
My guess is other contracts may have used similar terms. This could have the effect of making Canada a lower priority than anyone wants.
This.
Look Sam, no one wants Canada to fail at this. If it’s not 3-4 weeks, it’s 6-8 weeks behind the US. We are going to have to take a hard look at pandemic readiness after this is over and ensure we are not left vulnerable in the future.
I don’t know if my kids are going to camp yet, I don’t know when I’ll get on a plane, I don’t know when I’ll be back on the office, but damned if I am not feeling very positive about what’s happening.
Since were lacking for reference material, here’s something we can look back at in 6 weeks to see how it went
There is data for future allocations of Moderna, Pfizer and the COVISHIELD vaccnines but it isn’t explicitly listed as per week. Given numbers drop for the Pfizer allocation between 29 Mar and 5 April I think it’s weekly.
If so that means by end of march 2.6 million Pfizer, 1.3 million Moderna and 0.5 million COVISHIELD shots should be completed in addition to what’s been done so far.
Note for those unaware, Covishield is the AZ vaccine produced under license in India. As I understand it, India currently has production exceeding their capability to administer domestically, so they’re giving us some presumably betting that we’ll return the favour once we’re oversupplied due to our notoriousy massive overpurchasing. Or possibly just to curry favour, pun not intended.
New Brunswick released its plan for vaccination. Looks like I’ll be eligible in June (40-49 age group with not enough other serious medical issues to warrant jumping the regular line).
What is likely to happen is it’ll be shuttled off to some underfunded working group and governments will largely ignore them. No one will take any responsibility or blame for the various failures.