China's Vision of a New World Order

"[CanSino] deserves credit for the speed with which they pushed the vaccine through pre-clinical studies and human testing."
"It tells you something about their ability to mobilize and leverage the resources that it takes to get all these done. the resources required here are substantial."
"The viral vector CanSino is using is a relatively safe approach compared to other techniques but it's hard to make a call on efficacy for now."
"There's no shortage of histories where promising efforts made it to the last stage of testing only to see things fall apart."
Wang Ruizhe, pharmaceutical industry analyst, Capital Securities Corp, Shanghai

"Most of our families stayed in Canada, and we could only see them a few times a year."
"When you think about your young kids and teenagers growing up without dads, when you know your wife had to shovel out of ten inches of deep snow early morning in -20C wind chill all by herself -- these were the tough moments."
Yu Xuefeng, chief executive, CanSino

"CanSino is in the game and it's about where the other so-called leaders are."
"Whether anybody will cross the finish line where we ever can see safety data that we would like to see is unknown."
William Haseltine, former HIV researcher, Harvard University

Credit: Cansino

In the desperate race to develop a vaccine to immunize populations against the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19, CanSino, a Chinese pharmaceutical company with ties to Canada boasts the reputation of having been the first to publish results of an initial trail with a product they developed with mixed results where its efficacy failed to impress and its alarming side-effects indicate that they're not quite there yet. The CEO of CanSino formerly worked for a Canadian pharmaceutical company, Sanofi as senior executive of vaccine operations.

The 57-year-old CEO of CanSino, born in China, took his doctorate at McGill Univrsity in microbiology. He became the head of vaccine development and production at Sanofi Pasteur in Canada. And now that he heads his own pharmaceutical company in China, relations in Canada with former colleagues have been maintained, at a time when both countries have seen their relations considerably cooled, in trade and diplomacy.

The U.S./Canada/Huawei affair where Huawei's CFO was taken into custody in Vancouver on an extradition warrant from the U.S. and where Meng Wanzhou awaits extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on charges of misleading U.S. banks on her company's sanction-breaking business with Iran, led to Beijing arresting two Canadians in China on trumped-up charges of espionage. Ms.Meng lives in her luxury Vancouver mansions on bail, while Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor languish in a Chinese prison with no legal representative, unable to communicate with their families and rarely permitted consular visits.

Canada has not yet stated whether or not the government has decided to permit the telecommunications giant Huawei to provide some of the content of Canada's 5G upgrade while Beijing has darkly warned Ottawa of 'consequences' should Huawei be shut out based on fears of the potential based on prior such incidents of Chinese cyber espionage. This is a country whose nationals infiltrated Canadian technology, in working exchanges with Canada's giant successful telecommunications giant, Nortel Industries.

Nortel was subjected to infiltration, to commercial espionage, to a ransacking of secret data by Chinese insiders working for Nortel whose activities eventually concluded in the complete collapse of Nortel Networks, with the one and sole beneficiary being Huawei which took on former Nortel employees and milked their experience and the trade secrets they brought with them, to launch Huawei as a world heavyweight in global telecommunications technology.

Now, CanSino's Yu appears to be following a similar trajectory, substituting bioengineering and pharmaceutical production for advanced communications technology. Yu, whose company has not yet generated revenue, facing a $22 million deficit in 2019 given its enormous investments, has linked his company an its scientific advances with Canada's largest research organization, the National Research Council.

Lab of Chinese vaccine maker CanSino Biologics in Tianjin. Stringer/Reuters files

While in China, Mr. Yu collaborates closely with prominent military scientist Chen Wei, a major general in China's People's Liberation Army who heads the Institute of Biotechnology at China's Academy of Military Medical Sciences. She has lent her expertise to working with CanSino in the development of an Ebola vaccine approved in 2017 for emergency use and national stockpiling in China. During the SARS outbreak of 2003 she succeeded in developing a therapy for Chinese health workers.

Credit: Cansino

More latterly, CanSino alongside Dr.Chen's team of researchers sped through pre-clinical studies on the coronavirus vaccine, named Ad5-nCoV, starting human clinical trials in Wuhan in mid-March. When CanSino published a study in the medical journal Lancet, the vaccine appeared safe, generating a level of immune response, but with severe shortcomings. But CanSino's Canadian ties has enabled it to receive approval for conducting Phase III tests on its vaccine in Canada where researchers at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology out of Dalhousie University are leading the clinical trials.

Yu had previously licensed a technology from the National Research Council of Canada in HEK 293 cell lines required to produce large quantities reliably of a vaccine, underpinning CanSino's viral vector technology. At the time few Chinese companies possessed that technology. The National Research Council has the option of producing doses of the vaccine for emergency pandemic use in Canada, should the vaccine candidate be approved by authorities.