Canada still has not produced a COVID-19 vaccine, but progress has been made
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.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.
That left Canada beholden to imported vaccines, limited early supplies and forced up the cost. The government promised that would change. 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.
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. He said BioVectra is in discussions now with various companies. The site can make multiple types of vaccine, including the popular mRNA vaccines. That technology was newly used for COVID-19 vaccines, but multiple trials are under way that use it to fight other infectious diseases, as well as cancers.Moderna is banking on that. The company was founded to bring an mRNA vaccine to market, and its COVID-19 vaccine is its first successful product.
The facility should be able to make up to 100 million doses a year, depending on the vaccine being produced. While manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines is the initial plan, Moderna is also planning to make its RSV and flu vaccines there, though neither has yet been authorized.Ottawa didn’t make a direct financial contribution to Moderna for the plant. Instead, it has an agreement to buy the vaccines that are to come off the plant’s manufacturing lines.
In May 2020, Canada funded AbCellera with $175.6-million to build Canada’s first antibody therapy manufacturing plant in Vancouver over the next five years. Murray McCutcheon, senior vice-president of corporate development at AbCellera, said the new 130,000-square plant is on schedule.
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