From: brewnoserii@gmail.com   
      
   Star Business Columnist - Sat., March 20, 2021   
      
      
   Canada needs the Connaught model of domestic vaccine production   
   The path to Canadian vaccine sovereignty will be long and arduous.   
      
   In a determined effort to achieve self-sufficiency in vaccine production,   
   Canada is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in scores of   
   vaccine-related companies and non-profit research centres.   
      
   With few exceptions, the COVID-19 vaccine candidates of those companies and   
   research centres are of unproven safety and efficacy.   
      
   If they do prove themselves in clinical trials, most of the facilities to   
   manufacture the vaccines are still in the planning stage, with just one under   
   construction.   
      
   And any Health Canada-approved COVID-19 vaccines that result from the federal   
   effort will not be available until late this year or early 2022.   
      
   Justin Trudeau is committed to repatriating Canadian vaccine production.   
      
   “Canada will be developing domestic manufacturing [of vaccines], so   
   regardless of what could happen in the future, we will have domestic   
   production,” the PM has vowed.   
      
   Note that word “repatriating.” Canada was once a world leader in both   
   vaccine development and mass production. We allowed that capability to slip   
   away long ago. More on that later.   
      
   Ottawa has promised that all Canadians willing to be vaccinated will get at   
   least their first jab by July.   
      
   For that to happen, we have to hope that Europe, Ottawa’s chosen sole source   
   of vaccines, will not impose on Canada the vaccine export controls by which   
   European countries have been withholding or threatening to block exports of   
   vaccine supplies among    
   each other.   
      
   Meanwhile, Canada ranks 36th in per capita vaccinations among countries with   
   more than one million population.   
      
   Last weekend, Ontario reported that in March, Ottawa will provide it with less   
   than one-third the number of vaccine doses that the province is capable of   
   administering.   
      
   “With the uncertainty surrounding a steady supply of vaccines, it’s clear   
   we need to start production of COVID vaccines right here in Canada,” Doug   
   Ford has said. (>_<)   
      
   The Ontario premier is an expert on what Ottawa now calls “in-sourcing” of   
   essential supplies. (=_=)   
      
   Early in the pandemic’s first wave, last spring, Ford called on the Ontario   
   auto-parts sector to quickly convert to making ventilators and other emergency   
   medical supplies.   
      
   The largely Canadian-owned auto-parts firms came through with flying colours,   
   their employees knowing that they were engaged in protecting the lives of   
   fellow Canadians.   
      
   That has been a pandemic lesson in the life-and-death importance of local   
   ownership and local decision-making.   
      
   Of necessity, Canada has quickly become self-sufficient in a great many   
   medical supplies that were long ago off-shored.   
      
   But on COVID-19 vaccines, we remain at the mercy of offshore suppliers, which   
   include Britain, the U.S., China, India and Russia.   
      
   To be sure, Ottawa has many irons in the fire on achieving vaccine sovereignty.   
      
   But Ottawa’s partnership with U.S.-based Novavax won’t yield a   
   made-in-Canada vaccine until early 2022. Its deal with Precision NanoSystems   
   Inc., of Vancouver, aims for a vaccine by about the same time.   
      
   And a promising vaccine candidate at Medicago Inc., of Quebec City, if   
   approved, won’t be available until 2023 or 2024.   
      
   To be sure, there is long-term benefit to those projects, even if Canada will,   
   with luck, be past the third wave of the pandemic by the time any   
   Canadian-produced vaccines become available.   
      
   Every major vaccine in history has been continually upgraded and refined.   
   Though the made-in-Canada vaccines will be latecomers, they will have the   
   advantage of real-life experience from earlier vaccines.   
      
   The Canadian vaccine producers are likely to engineer their vaccines to better   
   protect, for instance, children, pregnant women and Canadians exposed to the   
   COVID-19 variants.   
      
   And, of course, Canada will have regained at least some proficiency in vaccine   
   invention and production.   
      
   Which simply brings us back full circle.   
      
   For seven decades prior to the late 1980s, Toronto-based Connaught   
   Laboratories Ltd. was a global leader in vaccine development and production.   
      
   Connaught is still best known for its mass production of insulin, discovered   
   at the University of Toronto in 1921.   
      
   But the publicly owned, non-profit Connaught also invented and mass-produced   
   affordable treatments and vaccines for the deadly scourges of diphtheria,   
   typhoid, tetanus, meningitis and polio. And Connaught’s scientists helped   
   advance the breakthroughs    
   in penicillin and the eradication of smallpox.   
      
   By the time it was sold, in a late-1980s privatization drive by then-PM Brian   
   Mulroney to what is now France’s Sanofi S.A., Connaught was exporting to 124   
   countries.   
      
   It would next be the turn of Montreal vaccine maker Institut Armand Frappier   
   (IAF), named for a trail-blazing Canadian scientist in tuberculosis treatment,   
   to pass from Canadian hands and cease to be a force in vaccine R&D. (ಠ_ಠ)   
      
   In the late 1980s, and renamed as BioChem Pharma, the firm’s Montreal   
   researchers developed the breakthrough HIV/AIDS treatment 3TC (Epivir), which   
   became the world standard in HIV/AIDS treatment.   
      
   But in 2000, BioChem was sold to what is now British pharmaceutical giant   
   GlaxoSmithKline PLC. (>_<)   
      
   GSK and Sanofi maintain only limited vaccine production in Canada, and   
   aren’t capable of mass-producing a pandemic vaccine.   
      
   Connaught was.   
      
   The untold story of Dr. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine is that breakthrough   
   chemical formulations that advanced his work were developed by Connaught,   
   which supplied them to Salk at his University of Pittsburgh laboratories.   
      
   The later U.S. rollout of Salk’s vaccine was abruptly suspended early in the   
   1950s polio crisis when a few batches of commercially produced Salk vaccine,   
   improperly tested by a California manufacturer, led to the vaccine causing   
   polio cases.   
      
   By contrast, every batch of the mass-produced Connaught vaccine was   
   scrupulously tested by Canadian federal authorities. Ottawa had decided   
   against the U.S. practice of delegating inspection to the manufacturers.   
   ヽ(^。^)ノ   
      
   And there being no reported problems with it, Connaught used the Salk vaccine   
   it helped invent to quickly vaccinate the entire country.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)