Bad Faith China Syndrome

"It's likely that the shipment is being delayed as part of China's retaliation against Canada over the Meng [Wanzhou/Huawei Technology] arrest."

"But it could also be due to the kind of sudden, unexplained delay that routinely happens when you're dealing with China's opaque and often uncooperative customs authorities."

"Either way, it raises the question of why the National Research Council thought it was a good idea to work with a Chinese partner on such a sensitive project."

David Mulroney, Canadian ambassador to China, 2009--2012

"We are continuing to wait for the vaccine."

"All we know is that it's awaiting customs clearance by the Chinese government for export. We have not been able to obtain any projected time lines."

"Nothing much else I can say, other than we can start the trial as soon as we receive the vaccine."

Scott Halperin, head, planned Phase-1 trial, Canadian Center for Vaccinology, Dalhousie University

Chinese vaccine maker CanSino Biologics’ sign is pictured on its building in Tianjin, China, Nov. 20, 2018. Stringer/Reuters/File

CanSino's Ad5-nCoV vaccine is the first of many vaccines to have published the results of its initial stage 1 tests. Which led to the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet publishing the first set of data about the efficacy of CanSino’s vaccine in humans. A coup for CanSino, and a hope that an efficacious and safe vaccine would shortly be available. If successful, however, it would be one among many. The initial findings indicated Ad5-nCoV induced binding antibodies in most people given the vaccine within 28 days.

Of the larger number of study subjects exposed to the vaccine, one-hundred-and-eight healthy volunteers responded to the vaccine in a way that was read as "safe and well-tolerated", though some of the subjects experienced troubling side-effects. Ad5-nCoV was also approved by China’s military for use by its soldiers for one year. The Chinese military’s medical research unit was also known to have played a role in the development of Ad5-nCoV.

Which leaves open to question why the National Research Council, Canada's premiere medical research group, would choose to make itself available in an agreement with a Chinese biomedical corporation with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military. CanSino's founder has a Canadian connection, having studied and worked in Canada on biomedical research. But Canada's experience with China, in particular the most recent events have been so fraught with enmity it becomes a puzzle that the government -- not the NRC -- agreed that this critical file would be attached to China's whims.

China has already demonstrated aptly its disregard for international norms when it arbitrarily took under arrest two Canadian businessmen on trumped-up charges of espionage to use them as leverage to force Canada to release Huawei's chief operating officer held on an extradition warrant issued by the United States. Further pressure was applied when a Canadian charged with drug smuggling was suddenly given a death penalty for his crimes. And previous trade agreements for the import of Canadian canola, pork and other comestibles were suddenly cancelled.

The very issue of China's miserable human rights record has never given pause to the Liberal government in its ambition to strike an advantageous trade agreement with Beijing. That ambition of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's was aborted when conditions were placed on any trade agreement that Canada would sign with any international trade group; insisting on inclusion of respect and equality for women and unions and minorities. China doesn't appreciate being lectured or dictated to.

China is known as a country whose government has never been averse to hijacking other countries' trade and military secrets through cybersecurity infractions. And its past performance infiltrating Canada's world-renowned Nortel Networks, purloining secret data which eventually helped lead to Nortel's downfall followed by former Chinese Nortel employees helping to found Huawei should have been an object lesson in the benefits to be had by maintaining a wide distance between Ottawa and Beijing. A lesson Prime Minister Trudeau flung aside.

According to the agreement signed between CanSino and the NRC in mid-May, the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University was to have begun a small Phase 1 safety trial with the vaccine, with the possibility of Phase 2 and 3 trials to follow. On regulator approval, the vaccine could be manufactured at a facility in Montreal owned by the NRC to ensure that Canada was "among the first in the world to have access to a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19", according to the National Research Council.

It is now known that CanSino conducted talks with Russia, Brazil, Chile and Saudi Arabia to conduct Phase 3 trials. And it just signed an agreement with Egypt to test and produce the vaccine once it could be determined that the vaccine does protect people against infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19.  "It might also be that China would prefer to ensure that any vaccine is developed in China first and not shared with a foreign country, especially Canada", suggested Guy Saint-Jacques another former Canadian ambassador to China.

Alternately, he said, the situation "could well be part of the Chinese arsenal" in the dispute over Meng's arrest. As for the CanSino vaccine candidate, it makes use of a harmless virus as a system of delivery where the "adenovirus" is modified to express part of the SARS-CoV-2 germ causing COVID, which should trigger the immune system to fight the coronavirus. Dampened immune response occurred in some people, theoretically attributed to the thought they were exposed previously to the adenovirus backbone in the vaccine and resulting antibodies repelled the vaccine.

A technician works at a manufacturing facility of Chinese vaccine maker CanSino Biologics in Tianjin,China.    Reuters

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.