China's Exploitative Agenda : Canada a Willing Foil

"Why would we not choose to be affiliated with those efforts [other promising COVID vaccines backed by major Western universities and companies], and instead pick as our preferred partner the Chinese military and a Chinese company?"
"This vaccine candidate is nothing but a dead man walking now."
Dr.Amir Attaran, health policy professor, University of Ottawa

"There are a lot of challenges this vaccine platform will face ... This will be a little bit like winning the lottery to get this to the end."
"That's why I'm at a bit of a loss about this. I still don't understand how did that work? What was the decision mechanism to invest in this?"
"A vaccine that gives you grade-3 side effects in phase 1 is not a prime candidate."
Dr.Gary Kobinger, professor, Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, Laval University

CanSino Biologics, a Chinese company developing a COVID-19 vaccine with the help of some Canadian scientists, saw some early success in the first phase of clinical trials

Scientists across the globe are working tirelessly and anxiously, hoping to find a solution to the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, in a vaccine to prevent the global ravages of the dangerous disease. Dangerous enough that it has infected eight million people worldwide and strained international medical resources beyond their limits, lethal enough that close to a half-million  people have lost their lives to its dread effects.

A Chinese company called CanSino Biologics has a vaccine in the final stages of development and Canada's prime minister announced in May that Canada would be holding human trials of that vaccine in a partnership between Canada and China. At a time of critically strained relations with a belligerent Beijing which has been bullying its way across the world in every sphere of human endeavour, technological advance and geographical sovereignty.

The Chinese vaccine in fact, is one based on a cell line that was developed by Canada's National Research Council. The NRC has long worked with Chinese scientists in partnership advances in the past. Ties between the NRC and a Vancouver-based biotechnology company with its own COVID-19 vaccine candidate also enter the picture, as yet another COVID-centric vaccine research effort.

Last month, CanSino was the first biotech company globally to publish a peer-reviewed outcome of a vaccine trial for COVID-19; early trial results that produced iffy results. Other COVID vaccines appear more promising, and backed by major Western universities and companies, so it seems passing strange that the government of Canada would support a partnership between its own and Chinese researchers,

All the more so given China's propensity to take full credit and to appropriate joint efforts; given badly strained political-diplomatic relations between Canada and China, where Beijing is holding two Canadians ransom in a tit-for-tat standoff related to the lawful detention of an elite Chinese tech executive on an extradition warrant called by the U.S., leading China to accuse the Canadians of espionage. Exacting, in addition, trade punishments on Canada, exerting pressure for her release.

Laval University professor, Gary Kobinger who previously worked at Canada's National Microbiology Lab where he helped to develop an Ebola vaccine and treatment, declared his opinion that the CanSino vaccine looks dubious, expressing his professional puzzlement at the Canada/China partnership in its development. This is the same laboratory where a Chinese researcher, her husband and Chinese research students were escorted off campus declared persona non grata a year earlier.

The CanSino Ad5-nCoV vaccine appears to have failed the most basic of tests for patient safety. Its phase 1 results, published in The Lancet, reflected a study whose immune response to SARS-CoV-2 was effective for half the subjects, but also resulted in a 'damping' effect on close to half the 108 subjects exposed to Ad-5. The elevated fever that half of the participants suffered represents a side effect seen as very negative.

CanSino Biologics’ sign on building in Tianjin, China  REUTERS/Stringer

In total, the government of Canada has committed $1 billion in funding to COVID-19 research, but refuses to divulge how much of that total funding is being spent on the CanSino studies overseen by Dalhousie University's Canadian Centre for Vaccinology. "Commercial confidentiality" shelters the details from public view, according to Hans Parar, an Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada spokesman.

The arrangement is for the National Research Council to produce the vaccine for the Canadian market at a manufacturing facility in Montreal should the trials prove a success, where the NRC should be capable of producing 70,000 to 100,000 does monthly by year's end. A role that would place Canadians "among the first in the world to have access to a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19". A peculiar statement, given that Canada signed on to a global agreement that no one country should monopolize the vaccine, but see that it would be simultaneously available globally.

A technician at CanSino Biologics in Tianjin, China.  REUTERS/Stringer

Even while the government of Canada is funding a number of other vaccine projects, many within Canada, including one at the University of Saskatchewan, moving steadily toward human trials, the partnership with Canada and China has its worrying roots. CanSino worked with the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences' bioengineering institute on the Ebola product.

And while evidence does not exist that the academy has any inappropriate role in the coronavirus project, it is well to remember that the Communist Party of China has issued a broad reminder to all Chinese citizens and corporate interests of their obligated responsibility to place the interests of China first and foremost in all their dealings. U.S. researchers last yer produced an article stating that China's defence planners are interested in "biology as an emerging domain of warfare".

The article had as a co-author Elsa Kania, a research fellow at Georgetown University Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. It all makes eminently good sense from China's perspective. The point of advantage from the Canadian perspective is somehow missing.