The Consensus Builds - In Crisis Canada Cannot Afford to be Dependent On "The Market"
Canada is paying for a failure that goes back through every federal government since Mulroney including Chretien, Martin, Harper and Trudeau - the lot.
As we've done on so many things, we placed the safety of our people, the security of our economy, on the globalized "invisible hand" of free market capitalism only to discover that hand wasn't reaching out when we needed it.
We should have realized what was going on from the outset when the availability of gowns, gloves and N95 masks needed to protect frontline health care workers dried up. Our scramble to source these products ought to have been an eye-opener. Apparently not.
The Globe's Campbell Clark writes how, when it came to the new mRNA vaccines, Canada gambled on foreign producers to meet our needs. That hasn't turned out as hoped. Wishful thinking is whistling past the graveyard.
"When there is a global crisis like a pandemic, there will be an international rush to obtain the things that will alleviate it, like vaccines, so importing those things will be hard. And borders matter.
"There wasn’t a lot of vaccine manufacturing in Canada. There wasn’t any production of mRNA vaccines, such as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines now used for COVID-19. Before December, no mRNA vaccine had ever been commercially approved.
"So when Providence Therapeutics, a Calgary company, applied last April to have the feds back rapid development of an mRNA vaccine that would actually be produced in Canada, there were reasons why it didn’t seem so obvious. The company’s chief executive Brad Sorenson said they were at the same stage of development as Moderna but didn’t get the full-on, $30-million-plus backing to run the same race.
"There were reasons to doubt. It was then an unproven kind of vaccine technology. Officials thought Providence was too small to bet on, Mr. Sorenson said in an interview.
"But now we know: It is worthwhile to gamble more on made-in-Canada vaccines.
"Once, it seemed simple enough to depend on the global free flow of goods to get vaccines. Just buy them. Now Canada’s vaccination rate is lagging several countries we see as peers, and there are angry questions about procurement.
"But beyond that debate, we now know something for sure: Scarce vaccines don’t flow freely across borders.
Mr. Sorenson said he doesn’t really blame the government, because big companies were promising to deliver. Providence did eventually get linked with the National Research Council, which provided up to $4.7-million, but that was essentially walking rather than running.
"...now, there is a Canadian mRNA vaccine developer, planning to make the vaccines in Canada, in conjunction with another firm, Northern RNA. They are developing mRNA infrastructure in Canada.
"Maybe that won’t save us in the next global crisis, but there’s a good bet that kind of next-generation infrastructure will be useful.
'"Do we want that capacity within our borders, and do we want to be a player on the international stage?” Mr. Sorenson asked. At one time, it might have seemed like that was an unneeded gamble. Now we should know better."
"Maybe that won’t save us in the next global crisis, but there’s a good bet that kind of next-generation infrastructure will be useful.
ReplyDeleteOnly to be sold off when it becomes profitable!!
TB
The next post, TB, deals with our "evolutionary mismatch." Loose cultures have a reluctance to accept the scope of threats and make sacrifices to combat them. It's an interesting study out of the journal, Lancet Planetary Health.
DeleteWhen you think of loose cultures the recent spread of Covid across southern California is a textbook example. Trump was the poster boy of loose culture when he minimized the Covid threat and assured the American people that it would just magically disappear even as his government failed to respond in a timely and effective manner.
If the Globe's Campbell Clark had bothered to visit their website, he'd have discovered that Providence Pharmaceuticals is a Toronto outfit.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-providence-1.5887613
They were on Global News this morning saying roughly what's said here, and talking about the trials in TORONTO, and not having to use such big samples of people, because mRNA vaccines are no longer new, which should speed approval by Health Canada. The Calgary operation to make the Covid vaccine is an offshoot joint production facility and lab with an Alberta company. So kenney, supreme right wing pudgeball and CO2 apologist LUCKS out through no fault of his own with location. If it succeeds we'll never hear the end of his self-congratulations.
Medicago of Quebec City are having to go the full route of 30,000 persons trials with their Covid-19 vaccine. Phase 1 is complete, Phase 2 is starting:
https://www.medicago.com/en/media-room/medicago-and-gsk-announce-start-of-phase-2-3-clinical-trials-of-adjuvanted-covid-19-vaccine-candidate/
They're spending $245 million on their new Quebec production facility, originally intended for other vaccines they already make from what I can make out.
Global seems to have been the most interested in these Canadian efforts until CBC woke up last week. You'd think the media would be on it like sh!t on a blanket, but you'd be wrong. At least both Global and Rosie Barton seem to have worked out that Boris not making up the shortfall from the Belgian AstraZeneca plant is why the EU slapped export controls on Pfizer vaccine. The rest of the media wafflers and provincial premiers wander around in a daze as usual.
And there's more pontification everywhere of course about the need to produce our own vaccine. Pontification I tend to find hilariously superbly haughty, being as it is painted with the benefit hindsight brings. It's one thing to say all the subsequent governments have failed to bring back a Crown Corp vaccine company, splutter complain - what were they NOT thinking, yet quite a task to find any essays at all over the past 34 years from independent observers decrying our national inability to revive such an industry. In other words, everyone just forgot about it till now, including me.
I fondly imagined that our top Public Servants were as nefarious as those in Britain, or indeed the USA, scheming away behind the scenes with patriotic national contingency plans for all and sundry possibilities. Only to discover that our lot are a thin shell covering hundreds of thousands of lifetime employment putting-in-timers. Oh well. The patriotic unity of Canada has never been much to write home about.
Thanks BIll for your astute comments.
DeleteOthers on this site seem to have really got their knickers in a knot & "painted with the benefit hindsight brings".
If the Globe's Campbell Clark had bothered to visit their website, he'd have discovered that Providence Pharmaceuticals is a Toronto outfit.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-providence-1.5887613
They were on Global News this morning saying roughly what's said here, and talking about the trials in TORONTO, and not having to use such big samples of people, because mRNA vaccines are no longer new, which should speed approval by Health Canada. The Calgary operation to make the Covid vaccine is an offshoot joint production facility and lab with an Alberta company. So kenney, supreme right wing pudgeball and CO2 apologist LUCKS out through no fault of his own with location. If it succeeds we'll never hear the end of his self-congratulations.
Medicago of Quebec City are having to go the full route of 30,000 persons trials with their Covid-19 vaccine. Phase 1 is complete, Phase 2 is starting:
https://www.medicago.com/en/media-room/medicago-and-gsk-announce-start-of-phase-2-3-clinical-trials-of-adjuvanted-covid-19-vaccine-candidate/
They're spending $245 million on their new Quebec production facility, originally intended for other vaccines they already make from what I can make out.
Global seems to have been the most interested in these Canadian efforts until CBC woke up last week. You'd think the media would be on it like sh!t on a blanket, but you'd be wrong. At least both Global and Rosie Barton seem to have worked out that Boris not making up the shortfall from the Belgian AstraZeneca plant is why the EU slapped export controls on Pfizer vaccine. The rest of the media wafflers and provincial premiers wander around in a daze as usual.
And there's more pontification everywhere of course about the need to produce our own vaccine. Pontification I tend to find hilariously superbly haughty, being as it is painted with the benefit hindsight brings. It's one thing to say all the subsequent governments have failed to bring back a Crown Corp vaccine company, splutter complain - what were they NOT thinking, yet quite a task to find any essays at all over the past 34 years from independent observers decrying our national inability to revive such an industry. In other words, everyone just forgot about it till now, including me.
I fondly imagined that our top Public Servants were as nefarious as those in Britain, or indeed the USA, scheming away behind the scenes with patriotic national contingency plans for all and sundry possibilities. Only to discover that our lot are a thin shell covering hundreds of thousands of lifetime employment putting-in-timers. Oh well. The patriotic unity of Canada has never been much to write home about.
My concerns, Bill, aren't limited to pharmaceuticals but to the faltering state of resilience generally in Canada. At the municipal, provincial and federal levels, governments are failing to maintain our critical systems from water and sewage utilities to roads, railbeds and the electrical grid.
DeleteDuring the last Calgary floods, an annual conference of some association for disaster engineering convened in Toronto. The CBC interviewed an engineering professor emeritus from McGill about the state of essential infrastructure in Canada. This fellow estimated it would cost at least a trillion dollars to rehabilitate, replace and upgrade the core infrastructure upon which our communities and economy rely. Yet, in this era of "everyday low taxes," our governments have an inability to address these vulnerabilities, preferring wherever possible to delay, defer and postpone whatever they can.
I think we can all agree that "but for" the arrival of Covid-19 to our shores there would have been no impetus to create a domestic capability to produce vaccines. It's good to see that progress is now being made but, here again, we're playing catch up.
We're still wringing out the dwindling benefits of infrastructure some of which was built in my grandfathers' and dad's day at a time when Canada was far less populous and affluent. Canada in the 50s and 60s invested heavily in the future but we don't do that today, not on that scale. We don't act. We react which narrows options and deprives us of the advantage of initiative.
@ Bill Malcolm.
ReplyDeleteAmerican exceptionalism and it's sibling Canadian or UK exceptionalism is distraction at best and propaganda at worst.
Diving in to nationalistic visions of grandeur is always the escape of those that wronged the masses to fill their own pockets.
And thus we are here with Covid 19 and it's multiplying variants .
We 'still' live in a world of short term election cycles and even shorter economic ones as our capitalistic visions disappear.
We are dealing with Covid 19 as we have dealt with market failures of the past .
O'h , it's just a natural cycle! normality will resume as soon as possible.
We are into the first year of Covid and already it's greatest supporter is the need to profit.
TB
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Thank you all for reading,
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