OTTAWA -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says a deal has been struck with Novavax to produce its COVID-19 vaccine in Canada, but the pharmaceutical company won’t be ready to roll out doses for several months.
The federal government has signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Novavax to pursue options to produce its COVID-19 vaccine at a new Montreal facility that is under construction.
While the prime minister is calling this a “major step forward,” it could be months before this potential first made-in-Canada vaccine candidate is approved, let alone shipped to delivery sites nationwide. This is because the new National Research Council biomanufacturing facility where the production will happen isn’t set to be completed until July.
Once the new facility is up and running, it’s designed to produce around two million doses a month and, should the Novavax vaccine be deemed safe and effective, Trudeau says “tens of millions” of doses will be made domestically. The facility will not be able to produce MRNA vaccines, however, which are the kind of vaccines Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are supplying.
The federal government has a deal with the Maryland-based company to purchase up to 76 million doses of its vaccine candidate.
“We need as much domestic capacity for vaccine production as possible,” Trudeau said Tuesday.
The National Research Council’s new Biologics Manufacturing Centre at the Royalmount site in Montréal was given $126 million in August 2020, and according to the government, the construction remains “on schedule.”
Novavax submitted its vaccine candidate to Health Canada for approval late last week. It is the fifth company to do so, following AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which are still under review but are set to be the next options granted the green light.
Trudeau has also announced that a second company, Precision NanoSystems, is “on track” to manufacture vaccines domestically, but in 2023 at the earliest.
On Tuesday, the prime minister announced $25.1 million for the Vancouver-based biotechnology company, which is in the process of building a $50.2 million biomanufacturing centre “to produce vaccines and therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of diseases such as infectious diseases, rare diseases, cancer and other areas of unmet need,” according to the government.
The government says the project proposal was reviewed by the COVID-19 joint biomanufacturing subcommittee. Its target date for completion is March 2023, and at that point it would have the capacity to produce up to 240 million doses of its self-amplifying ribonucleic acid (RNA) COVID 19 vaccine every year.
The Liberals had previously put $18.2 million towards trials for its vaccine candidate.
As The Canadian Press has reported, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada and the National Research Council have been in talks with international front-running vaccine manufacturers, seeking to have them scale up production in Canada. This included unsuccessful talks with CanSino Biologic over producing its vaccine candidate. That partnership was halted after China refused to export doses to Canada for a clinical trial.
This news comes as the federal government has been facing numerous questions over the lack of capacity to produce COVID-19 vaccines domestically, and reliance on other countries to deliver the currently approved vaccines.
“We knew that there would be some hurdles along the way with unpredictability and increased demand for production,” Trudeau said. “It’s why we secured as many options as possible… and it’s why we invested in vaccine development and manufacturing here at home.”
With both European manufacturers Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna sending smaller deliveries of their COVID-19 vaccines to Canada this week, exacerbating the ongoing dose shortage nationwide, the move to become more self-reliant on vaccine manufacturing provides an eventual new avenue for domestic vaccine supply.
Though it remains to be seen whether this new deal will assist the federal government significantly in its goal of having all Canadians who want to be, vaccinated by the end of September given the current timeline.
The prime minister also provided an update on the pre-existing investments made with Canadian bio manufacturers, including $46 million towards the vaccine development facility at the University of Saskatchewan’s Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization. Known as VIDO-Intervac, it’s now projecting they will be able to produce up to 40 million doses annually once it is completed by the end of 2021.
Similarly, the federal government has put $173 million into Quebec-based Medicago’s plant-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate and the production of it, but the company’s initial plans are to mass produce its doses in North Carolina while work is underway to build a new Quebec facility that is planning to be ready in late 2023.
The move to revive more Canadian vaccine manufacturing was sparked amid the pandemic, after the industry dwindled considerably over the preceding decades. As The Canadian Press has reported, the existing vaccine producers Sanofi in Toronto and GlaxoSmithKline in Quebec are collaborating on a COVID-19 vaccine, but it’s not expected to be made in Canada.
On Tuesday, the prime minister noted that while COVID-19 cases have been declining nationwide for three weeks, the country is still far from returning to some sense of normalcy, restating that vaccinations will be central to that eventual resumption of pre-pandemic life.
In an effort to promote immunization take-up once the country has enough doses to start mass vaccination, Trudeau announced Tuesday that the federal government is launching a $64 million public education and awareness campaign and enhancements to record-keeping of vaccine appointments to ensure Canadians know when and where to get their shots.
More coming.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMidWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmN0dm5ld3MuY2EvcG9saXRpY3MvY2FuYWRhLW1ha2VzLWRlYWwtd2l0aC1ub3ZhdmF4LXRvLXByb2R1Y2UtaXRzLWNvdmlkLTE5LXZhY2NpbmUtaW4tY2FuYWRhLXBtLTEuNTI5MTgzNdIBAA?oc=5
2021-02-02 18:30:00Z
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