LILLEY: Trudeau's new vaccination plant won't help us
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Justin Trudeau stood proudly in front of Rideau Cottage in Ottawa and made it sound like reinforcements were on the way to help defeat COVID-19.
Canada, you see, is about to finally start making vaccines in this country again.
“This is a major step forward to get vaccines made in Canada, for Canadians,” Trudeau said.
Sounds good; it’s what I’ve been calling for. We should be making vaccines in Canada.
The problem is that Trudeau’s plan doesn’t call for retooling an existing facility, the whole plan is to keep moving forward with a new plant for the National Research Council in Montreal.
Construction is months behind schedule and the building won’t be completed until the summer. When asked when vaccines would actually be ready, Trudeau was vague and told reporters they should ask the ministers in charge at the next news conference.
So they did.
“At the end of the year we will be in a position to be producing vaccine,” Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said.
See, after the construction is complete, it will take several months to get the plant ready to produce a vaccine, then Health Canada will have to inspect it and approve it as a vaccine facility.
This announcement changes nothing in terms of timelines for when Canadians will get vaccinated.
The vaccine that we plan on developing hasn’t even been approved by Health Canada yet. In fact, it hasn’t been approved for use anywhere yet and is in line behind Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
As he made his announcement about this vaccine that might be ready to go by the end of this year, Trudeau not only bragged about what his government has done but tried to imply that it was the Harper government’s fault that Canada wasn’t already producing its own vaccines.
A regular claim from the Trudeau Liberals is that Canada doesn’t have any domestic vaccine capacity.
“That’s just not true,” Paul Lucas told me over the phone just after Trudeau made his comments.
Lucas was the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline in Canada from 1995 through to 2012. He oversaw the GSK’s production of Canada’s H1N1 vaccine in 2009 and was there when the company signed a 10-year contract to supply flu pandemic vaccines for the federal government in 2011.
Lucas said that while it wouldn’t be simple to change an existing vaccine plant over to a COVID vaccine plant, it can be done and would be faster than building a new facility.
“It would take some planning, but yes, it could be done,” Lucas said.
Opposition parties in Ottawa rightly blasted Trudeau’s announcement.
“Canada is facing a serious vaccine shortfall,” Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said, noting shortfalls in deliveries from Pfizer and Moderna.
“This is something that should have been secured a long time ago,” said NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
Both opposition leaders are correct and Trudeau is doing nothing more than trying to fool the public. Increasingly, the public is blaming the Liberal government in Ottawa for the lack of vaccines in the provinces.
Ontario has had to change their vaccination plan three times and has now suspended offering shots to staff at nursing homes in order to try and ensure residents are vaccinated as soon as possible. It’s the same across the country.
In order to try and distract from the bad news, Trudeau is promising a vaccine next December.
Compare that to Britain which had less vaccine manufacturing capacity than Canada at the beginning of the pandemic and is now making the Astra-Zeneca vaccine for its population.
Britain is fourth in the world in vaccinating their population and Canada is now 30th — down from 23rd on the weekend, and 12th two weeks ago.
The Trudeau government’s handling of vaccines for Canada has been a failure. This announcement doesn’t change that.
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