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Results: 76 - 90 of 196
Marc-André Gagnon
View Marc-André Gagnon Profile
Marc-André Gagnon
2021-02-01 11:47
Thank you for your question.
Take the AstraZeneca vaccine, for example. It was developed by the University of Oxford. Initially, the university had pledged to offer nonexclusive, royalty-free licences for its vaccine, but ultimately went back on its decision, opting to give AstraZeneca exclusive rights to the vaccine.
I read this week that, according to AstraZeneca's CEO, Pascal Soriot, the challenge is vaccinating as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, because the virus is spreading and mutating in parts of the world where people don't have access to vaccines. The vaccine protection people are acquiring now could drop, and even become obsolete as potential new variants emerge. However, when asked to make the patent royalty-free to provide access to the technology, as initially promised, so more manufacturers could use their facilities to produce the vaccine, AstraZeneca refused. It prefers to operate with licensing agreements.
It's important to understand something. The Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation recently released a scorecard showing that AstraZeneca is currently the most ethical of the COVID-19 vaccine makers and is making every effort to offer accessible licences, but it's still extremely limited. Manufacturers are waiting even though their production lines are ready to go. Not only do they need to be given a compulsory licence and the formula, but they also need to have the knowledge and know-how. That's the only way they can help the effort. Under the current regime, companies seem quite reluctant to transfer that know-how.
What can we do, then? The thing to do would have been to ensure vaccine manufacturing capacity in Canada at the outset. The government made huge investments in Medicago to increase vaccine production capacity in Quebec. VIDO-InterVac, at the University of Saskatchewan, received considerable funding to boost its production capacity. Those are all positive steps, but Canada also needs to take a stand internationally and say that it wants to make the patents royalty-free. We are at war with a virus, so everyone should contribute to the war effort, not oppose initiatives to increase production capacity.
View Luc Thériault Profile
BQ (QC)
View Luc Thériault Profile
2021-02-01 11:50
Isn't that the only way to overcome the shortage? Back in the fall, a number of pharmaceutical companies announced that they had effective vaccines, and similar announcements followed. Is it safe to say that companies rushed to take as many orders as they could but were unable to fulfill them? Now we are caught in this situation. As I see it, the only answer is to democratize vaccine production through licensed patents, so we can produce the vaccines ourselves in the middle term. Do you not agree?
We have to build our production capacity so we can alter vaccines in response to variants, if need be. Pharmaceutical companies will never be able to produce enough vaccines for the entire planet.
Marc-André Gagnon
View Marc-André Gagnon Profile
Marc-André Gagnon
2021-02-01 11:51
I completely agree.
Early on, the efforts to find new vaccines were impressive. Many were developed. Now, pharmaceutical companies are signing confidential agreements with countries to deliver vaccines. We saw how quickly Pfizer-BioNTech ran into production issues—hence, this week's slowdown.
As for AstraZeneca, in Europe, the situation is much worse. Something of a trade war has erupted between Europe and the United Kingdom. If European countries want to prevent vaccine exports to the United Kingdom, under WTO rules, they have to prevent exports to Canada as well. We therefore find ourselves in a trade war where the companies are no longer able to fulfill their orders.
Countries adopted the strategy of lining up for pharmaceutical firms' vaccines and waiting for their doses, but now the doses aren't coming. What do they do now? It's late in the game to start coming up with new solutions.
Still, Canada has good vaccine production capacity—capacity that could be leveraged if royalty-free licences were offered on patents.
Amir Attaran
View Amir Attaran Profile
Amir Attaran
2021-02-01 11:53
I think it's a giant omission. As you know, there are many different vaccine technologies. You mentioned the adenovirus-based vaccines. There are two of those—AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson—and they're among the simplest to manufacture. We could manufacture them in Canada. It is a question of having a large vat in which you grow the cells that produce the vaccine. Then you purify the vaccine proteins, and then you formulate them and bottle them and all of that. We could do this in Canada. Contrary to the point of view that intellectual property is a big barrier here, AstraZeneca did license Brazil, Australia, India and several other countries to make its vaccine, and that has been done. Those countries are making the AstraZeneca vaccine. The intellectual property problems weren't that hard to solve. India is supplying it to its people as we speak. Brazil is rolling out the first doses this week. Australia, because it has so little COVID, is taking it more slowly.
This is something that Canada could do. The failure of the government to negotiate to produce the AstraZeneca vaccine back in the summer, as Brazil, India, Australia, Japan, Mexico and Argentina did, is a cardinal failure of this pandemic. Had we done so, we'd have something more right now.
Marc-André Gagnon
View Marc-André Gagnon Profile
Marc-André Gagnon
2021-02-01 11:55
In terms of the development of vaccines in Canada, the main project we had in Canada was this partnership with the Chinese company. It didn't work. If you look at the global level—the contribution of different governments, basically—more than half of the contributions, in terms of investment, are first and foremost public investments. In Canada, the new challenger in terms of a vaccine is now with Medicago. It's still in clinical trials, but let's just say that it would be an interesting surprise if it could go through because we would have here a very significant production capacity for this.
View Don Davies Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you.
I'll pick up on my colleague Mr. Thériault's questions. You have said that what we are seeing is, for you, a bit of a catastrophe. You said, “You end up with a handful of companies that are developing their own vaccines, each by themselves, working in silos.” You said, “So then you have a product with a patent, so monopoly rights on the product. And then you end up with this vaccine nationalism of all countries basically doing a free market negotiation in terms of who can jump the queue in order to get faster access to the vaccines.”
You said, “In terms of the priorities of global public health, this is pure nonsense.”
I'm wondering if we got the model wrong. We have a global pandemic. We're talking in terms of war. I'm wondering if we brought a stick to a gunfight. Is using the private-sector model of private companies' monopolizing the patent and the intellectual property the best way to get vaccines out to the world? What would you suggest as a different model for that?
Marc-André Gagnon
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Marc-André Gagnon
2021-02-01 11:57
This is an excellent question. First, there are alternatives, and this is something very important. We need to understand that more and more the type of research and development that is being done in pharmaceuticals is requiring us to go outside the patent model. Basically, patents work very well for certain research niches. For others, they don't work well, and in the case of pandemics like this one, it's very problematic because with the amount of power we're giving to drug companies, we then need to negotiate with these drug companies. Now we're negotiating maybe not with a gun to the head, but basically with a needle in the arm, and then we need to decide what we're going to do. We do not want to scare away the company by imposing some policies.
Let's just say that if the focus was on open science from the start, basically it would have been way more interesting.
I would like to add one thing. I agree with Dr. Attaran in terms of AstraZeneca, but AstraZeneca has been a bit different from other companies. It's the one that has been the most forward in doing these partnerships with other companies around the world. If you look at the different scoreboards with different companies, you see it's the only one that has been so proactive in this. With others, basically, it's all about preserving the expertise and knowledge they have.
Joel Lexchin
View Joel Lexchin Profile
Joel Lexchin
2021-02-01 12:06
Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to the committee.
I am an emergency physician and have been one since 1982. I taught health policy at York University from 2001 to 2016, and I've been researching pharmaceutical policy for about 40 years.
I'm going to go into four different areas.
First of all, we have the situation that Canada found itself in with respect to vaccine production at the start of the pandemic. Back in 1989, we sold off Connaught Laboratories to a French company. Then, in 2005, ID Biomedical Corporation was sold to GlaxoSmithKline. Therefore, when the pandemic hit, we had no domestically owned independent production. We did have warnings that we might need it back with SARS in 2003 and then with H1N1 in 2009. The Naylor report after SARS recommended that we develop an independent vaccine strategy, but we never did.
When the pandemic hit, we were vulnerable when it comes to vaccines. In order to try to ensure that we were going to be able to get the necessary vaccines, in June of 2020 the National Research Council set up an 18-member COVID-19 vaccine task force charged with making recommendations about vaccine acquisition to the federal government. Initially, the conflicts of interest of those committee members were kept secret until there was a public outcry.
The task force was highly selective. There was no representation for indigenous or Black people, the elderly, women or people with disabilities. Both the chair and the co-chair had significant conflicts of interest. Whether or not those conflicts of interest affected the recommendations they made to the government is unknown, because the exact nature of the recommendations is not public.
Other countries have handled the situation much differently. In the notes I submitted, you can see that Australia did things in a much different fashion.
We're now faced with the delays in the delivery of the Pfizer vaccine and possibly others. The delays in different countries are different. That might be due to the terms of the contracts that have been negotiated, but we don't know, because the contracts are kept secret. Also, we don't know anything about the price that Canada is paying versus the price in other countries. What are the guarantees about vaccine delivery and are there penalties for companies if they can't meet delivery schedules?
Finally, I want to talk about Canada's position on ensuring vaccine availability and affordability in low- and middle-income countries. Canada is one of the largest donors to COVAX. In July 2021, Prime Minister Trudeau signed a letter, along with other global leaders, which said, among other things, “We”—the global community—“cannot allow access to vaccines to increase inequalities within or between countries—whether low-, middle- or high-income.”
At the same time, Canada didn't support—and still hasn't supported—the WHO COVID-19 technology access pool. It hasn't supported the call by India and South Africa at the World Trade Organization for a temporary suspension of patents and other intellectual property. It has not publicly demanded that companies making vaccines ensure that they are available at production costs, and it has not said when it's going to donate excess vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.
I have four recommendations to make to the committee.
One, Canada needs to develop a national vaccine strategy that will consist of a strong and enduring financial commitment to publicly funded and publicly run vaccine research.
Two, we need a domestic, publicly owned vaccine manufacturing facility, so that in the future we can avoid the situation of privately owned Canadian companies being sold to foreign interests.
Three, Canada needs to make public the terms under which it granted money for COVID vaccine research and the terms of the contracts that it has signed with companies for vaccines.
Finally, Canada needs to publicly outline a detailed strategy about how it will contribute to ensuring that vaccine nationalism is avoided so that low- and middle-income countries can access vaccines in a timely manner in line with their needs.
Thank you very much.
View Don Davies Profile
NDP (BC)
Thank you.
I want to put two scenarios by you, Dr. Lexchin. From an epidemiological and public health infectious disease point of view, if we could immunize all seven billion humans in the next year versus not doing that, but rather, say, immunizing only a quarter of the world and doing the rest over the next 10 years, does that have any impact on the ability of this virus to mutate, or is it beneficial from a public health point of view to do one over the other?
Joel Lexchin
View Joel Lexchin Profile
Joel Lexchin
2021-02-01 12:57
In my view, what we want is a global strategy for this, so that the most vulnerable people in all countries get immunized to decrease the rate of spread. One of the things we know is that the faster the virus spreads and the more people it infects, the higher the likelihood that it's going to mutate.
That's one of the reasons we're seeing mutations coming from countries like Brazil, South Africa, the U.K. and possibly the United States. These are places where the virus has spread very rapidly and is widespread.
If we concentrate our immunization efforts, as we seem to be doing, on the rich countries, and then go to the low and middle-income countries, we're ensuring the development of mutations. Some of those mutations may be resistant to vaccines.
Canada should show leadership. Canada can't do this alone, but it can certainly show other countries the right course. The right course is for Canada to support the COVID-19 technology pool, to give more support to COVAX and to announce when we're going to be donating our excess vaccines to other countries.
Michael Grant
View Michael Grant Profile
Michael Grant
2021-01-28 15:43
Very good.
In recent years, we have seen many initiatives on Venezuela, which sometimes has made it challenging for the international community. Going forward, one of Canada's objectives is to ensure cohesion in the international community and that it continues to work together.
We have also instituted a number of pressures against the regime, including sanctions on individuals, and we are beginning to work quite closely with the United Kingdom on the issue of illegal gold.
View Heather McPherson Profile
NDP (AB)
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I need to reiterate what Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe has said. It's incredible work from all of you. Thank you so much for what you do.
I would like to ask Mr. Mueller some questions now, and I have a very quick question I wanted to touch on that I didn't have time for in my last intervention.
Mr. Mueller, you talked a bit about January 2021 being a time when there will be a report and when a review will be done of what is happening. Could you follow up on that? First of all, what will that look like? Second of all, will it be possible to do so, understanding the current COVID context we're in?
David Mueller
View David Mueller Profile
David Mueller
2020-12-10 19:47
The universal periodic review will take place in Geneva. It will still go forward, and it will be done virtually. It's a peer review. All nations will have a chance to give their feedback to Myanmar. There are over 40 civil society groups that have actively made recommendations. They've already presented in the presessions this week. Groups are going from mission to mission, promoting their recommendations.
I took this opportunity in my statement to list some of the issues that the INGOs collectively want to raise. Among them are the things we've talked about. Rights of women are among them, including education, as has been pointed out. The freedom of movement is probably the biggest one in relation to the Rohingya.
If Canada will be making recommendations as well, if you could take a look at the recommendations from any of those 40 groups and put those on your list as well, they are all valid and hitting at the main key points. They are really at a political level, not at a humanitarian level. There are many humanitarian workers ready and willing to work, but we can't do our jobs if there's not a political will to access that.
One big challenge is that if we don't change these laws about citizenship and such, the international community is allowing this thing to go forward and supporting a government in an apartheid policy. The Government of Myanmar will continue to separate these people. It has no intention of giving them a state. We need to take this opportunity, in the peer review, to strongly recommend that the citizenship laws be struck, that people's access to services be granted and that they are granted a state identification, so they can have their lives back.
Neil Desai
View Neil Desai Profile
Neil Desai
2020-12-09 16:42
To me, when someone says “strategy” in a public sector context, what I believe is that it has to be horizontal in government, not vertical. What I see being called “strategy” is that they've secured this specific thing. You know, this X-ray machine meets the needs of the security of this embassy. I think we have to be a little more holistic. I don't mean that just in a Canadian context. We have to look at multilateralism and evolve it as well.
We have the Five Eyes, which I would say is one of the most effective forms of multilateralism that Canada is a part of, discussing critical issues of cybercrime, infrastructure, integrity and such. We are putting it at risk currently.
I think better conversations with our allies where we have capabilities, not just in Canada but within our tight, close allies where we have co-accreditation of technologies and of governance of those technologies, these are some actual solutions we can be looking at. Not everything is going to be able to be built under the watchful eye of the Government of Canada. We have to take a risk management approach here, not a risk avoidance approach, because we're just going to be let down at the end of the day if we have a risk avoidance approach.
View Ali Ehsassi Profile
Lib. (ON)
View Ali Ehsassi Profile
2020-12-03 11:23
Thank you for that.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also touch on another new practice that has been adopted by your bureau, which is the new competition enforcement framework that Canada entered into with the U.S., New Zealand, Australia and the U.K.
Could you provide us with more details on that and provide us with your assessment as to how significant that is?
Results: 76 - 90 of 196 | Page: 6 of 14

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