Canada's Gross Mismanagement of Vaccine Procurement, Distribution and Inoculation

"We've been clear from the start. Canada is strongly determined to vaccinate Canadians while making sure that the rest of the world isn't getting left behind." 

"Our  participation into COVAX is a concrete example of that."

"At this point in time, the idea was always with COVAX that you would have developed countries and developing countries participate so that you would have global buy-in and support for the process." 

International Development Minister Karina Gould

"The COVAX vaccines were a way the developed countries, like Canada, were helping poorer countries have access to vaccines."

"The very fact that Canada is the only G7 country asking the COVAX consortium for vaccines is a demonstration that we have no plan, and Canadians need vaccines to get the country working to secure our future."

"It’s hard for me to divorce the inaction of the government over the last 10 months with what I would do today. We would not be in this position today."

Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has faced pressure to roll out vaccines faster, after delays    Reuters

The World Health Organization, in a bid to ensure that underdeveloped nations of the world not be left behind while their wealthier counterparts received life-saving vaccines against COVID-19, arranged a global pool to assist in the supply of vaccines to poorer countries unable to afford protection by procuring their own vaccines for their populations. The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is nothing if not prepared at all times to leap into a project with overtones of doing good, and virtue signalling compels the man to announce such a commitment to a universal do-good cause.

Accordingly, among other announcements he is so fond of promulgating to ensure that Canadians are aware that their government is hard at work on their behalf while at the same time not neglecting the obligation to scatter the fairy dust of good works elsewhere in the world, news of hundreds of millions being donated to such charitable good works enables the media to gush over the compelling news of Canadian charity, making Canadians proud of their collective wisdom and caring. 

 

Canada's investment in the COVAX pool under the auspices of the WHO and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (Gavi) represents a vote-winner for Trudeau at the next election.

Particularly when tallied atop this government's unquestioned expediting of taxpayers' lavish funding of financial aid during the COVID epidemic to Canadians in dire economic need. A need no Canadians not requiring government assistance find fault with, only the sloppy manner in which it has been administered so that people with robust incomes intact, teens, and others who shouldn't qualify have received payments upon application, which process had deliberately loose registration guidelines.

Like most things this government initiates and/or involves itself with, there are jarring realities involved serving to diminish the 'good' the government accomplishes and few things illustrate that more shockingly than the revelation that Canada has requested allocations of millions of vaccine doses through Gavi, a source meant to buy vaccines for poor nations, 92 low- and middle-income nations unable to afford purchasing of vaccines on their own.

 

The Advanced Market Commitment facility through COVAX fulfills that role. Canada made a contribution of $440 million to the COVAX fund, half earmarked to secure doses for itself. The fact of this matter is that Canada's current government decided to place its vaccine eggs in the wrong basket; an agreement with China to take part in research toward a COVID vaccine and share in its trials and production. Which fell through when Beijing decided to stop the export of its military-research-linked CanSino vaccine to Canada, permitting the vaccine to be shipped abroad elsewhere.

 

The investment Canada made in the CanSino vaccine was misdirected; those eggs produced no benefit for Canada, and only once that realization sunk in did the government hastily reach out to other pharmaceutical companies in the U.S. and Britain to sign procurement contracts, at a date much later than other countries in the G7 had seen fit to do, some of whom have their own vaccine-producing installations in place, which Canada did not.

 

Of over one hundred countries on Gavi's COVAX Interim Distribution Forecast list, Canada is present as one of a handful of wealthy participant countries along with New Zealand, South Korea and Singapore. Not all countries capable of producing the funds to enable ordering their own vaccine supplies participated in the Gavi program; Canada participated and expressed interest in the COVAX supply facility; hedging its bets to obtain sufficient vaccines as a late-starter, for its population. Canada is well behind a steady supply of vaccine volumes struggling behind peer countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Israel.

 

Canada garnered criticism from public health authorities elsewhere and human rights groups for vastly over-ordering vaccines in a desperate measure to 'keep up' with other wealthy countries vaccinating their populations, complicated by the fact that the two Health Canada-approved vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna have run into production-and-delivery problems. Canada is now in the position of being the only wealthy country in the G7 hoping to procure vaccines through a fund whose purpose is to provide vaccines to poor nations.

 

Canada continues to lag behind dozens of countries in taking delivery of vaccines and administering them, even to its most vulnerable population demographics. And when the World Health Organization recently begged wealthy countries urgently to begin donating surplus vaccine orders to COVAX for developing countries, the Canadian government responded that it is 'too early' to commit to any such donations where vaccination rates are  among the world's lowest.