Two years after Trudeau promised a made-in-Canada COVID vaccine, the country is still waiting
CBC
In the early days of the pandemic, the federal government announced a multi-million-dollar funding agreement with the National Research Council (NRC) to expand a vaccine facility in Montreal — a site Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said would pump out Canadian-made COVID-19 shots by November 2020.
Two years after the prime minister made that pledge, the NRC facility still hasn't produced a single vial of a COVID-19 vaccine.
A spokesperson for the NRC, the federal entity dedicated to research and development, told CBC News its vaccine facility recently secured the necessary Health Canada approvals. But the NRC still offered no target date for when the biologics manufacturing centre (BMC) will be operational.
"The inspection by Health Canada took place in late July 2022 and the facility has been rated as compliant," the NRC spokesperson said.
The spokesperson referred questions about vaccine production to Novavax, the Maryland-based company that was tapped by Ottawa to make COVID-19 shots at the facility.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Novavax said the company "continues to work with the NRC to complete the tech transfer of our COVID-19 vaccine" and it anticipates "integrating supply from this facility into our vaccine program" at an unspecified later date.
While announcing a $44-million investment for the NRC facility in April 2020, Trudeau said expanding this site and others would put Canada "at the forefront of scientific research" and give the country the "infrastructure to prepare vials for individual doses as soon as a vaccine becomes available."
In August of that year, the government pumped an additional $126 million into the NRC's Royalmount site, a federal investment that Trudeau said would "enable the preliminary production of 250,000 doses of vaccine per month starting in November 2020."
But when November 2020 came, Trudeau conceded there wouldn't be any shots rolling off the line as planned. The project's initial timeline was derailed by construction delays and a failed deal with a Chinese vaccine maker.
In February 2021, as Canada was grappling with limited vaccine supply, Trudeau claimed that the NRC's facility would finish construction sometime that summer — and that shots would soon follow.
"We expect the facility to be up and running by mid-2021," Trudeau said.
In an interview with CBC News at the time, Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne compared building this sort of facility from the ground up on such a constrained timeline to the U.S. mission to put a man on the moon.
"This is like the Apollo project," Champagne said. "Normally, it would take two to three years to do this, to get a production facility up and running."
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