Canada’s pledge to make more vaccines at home is still a work in progress

The COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t even six months old, and not a single vaccine for it had been approved for use anywhere, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to a podium in Montreal to promise that Canada’s National Research Council would be able to start churning out millions of doses by the end of 2021.

Nearly 1,000 days later, it hasn’t produced even one dose for clinical use.

But that day is coming.

Earl Brown, a virologist and professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, said getting a new plant from the ground up was never going to happen in less than a year.

“As soon as I heard that, I thought, ‘Well gee, that’s overly optimistic by a couple or three years.’ You have to have an objective, but that one wasn’t realistic.”

Still, Brown said if another coronavirus pandemic hits the world, Canada is now in a better position to make its own vaccines and medicines than it was when COVID-19 arrived three years ago.

“We are further ahead because we’ve taken initiative,” he said.

When Canada was negotiating contracts to buy COVID-19 vaccines in the summer of 2020, then-procurement minister Anita Anand asked every company if it could make their doses in Canada. All of them said no.

Anand, who is now the defence minister, said they all concluded that Canada’s biomanufacturing capacity “was too limited to justify the investment of capital and expertise to start manufacturing in Canada.”

That left Canada beholden to imported vaccines, limited early supplies and forced up the cost. The government promised that would change.

Between May 2020 and April 2022, Canada promised more than $1.3 billion for 12 new or expanded biomanufacturing plants to make vaccines and antibody treatments.

Most are still in construction, but Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said Friday things are moving well.

“I think we’re in a much better spot than we have ever been as a nation,” he said.

When he started as the minister in January 2021, he said Canada had capacity to make or at least complete the production on about 30 million doses of vaccine a year.

GlaxoSmithKline made seasonal flu vaccines at its plant in Quebec. Sanofi Pasteur was filling vials with polio vaccine in Toronto, but the vaccine itself was being made in Europe. Most other common immunizations, such as the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, are imported.

Sanofi is among the 12 companies expanding production capacity now. In March 2021 it received $415 million from Canada and another $55 million from the Ontario government, to build a flu vaccine plant at its Toronto campus by 2026.

Champagne said all together the new projects will get Canada close to 600 million doses a year, but most are still one to three years away from completion.

The National Research Council’s new Biologics Manufacturing Centre is one of the few that is ready to make vaccines as of spring 2023 — as many as two million doses a month. It just doesn’t have one to produce.

The brand-new, $126-million plant was built by June 2021, somewhat within the timeline Trudeau proposed. It took another 14 months to get a Health Canada licence to make vaccines.

But the only vaccine it has an agreement to produce is spluttering. Maryland-based Novavax said in February it may not be able to survive. It took too long to get its COVID-19 vaccine onto the market, and lost the race to Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

Eleven of the new projects involve vaccines. The twelfth one, AbCellera Biologics new manufacturing site, will make antibody therapies.