Over the past couple of weeks, a narrative has been developing that somehow the federal government negotiated a series of bad deals around vaccine procurement because, for reasons outside of this government's control, there have been delays in a handful of vaccine deliveries. Much of this narrative, however, has been premised on false or otherwise misleading information, and almost all of this has been giving cover to those who bear a bigger burden of responsibility for how bad the pandemic has played out in this country. The fact that this bogus information on what was or was not done continues to reappear and largely go unchallenged is a problem, especially when the government does itself no favours by not pushing back effectively against it.
There is a particularly ghoulish series of talking points that have emerged which attempt to blame new infections and deaths on the federal government because of vaccine delays. This is one of those points that is largely there to give cover to provincial premiers, who never should have been counting on vaccines as their primary means of controlling the pandemic in their provinces. Had they done their jobs of investing in increasing their capacity to test and trace cases, providing paid sick days, making schools safer, or actually doing the work of making long-term care facilities fit for human habitation and not the charnel houses of COVID, while instituting lockdowns when case numbers were low, there would have been little need for things to have gotten as bad as they've become.
Instead, the majority of premiers let things get out of control because they were too hidebound in their ideological need to keep the economy open at all costs, and in their inability to conceive of the need to pay people to stay at home in a pandemic in order to limit spread. They refused to spend money to do the necessary work, even when the federal government was tossing it at them left and right with few strings attached, if any. Once vaccines were in sight, they decided instead that this was their ticket out, but by that point, their case counts had started to overwhelm hospitals, and now most of us in this country are still in some kind of mockdown situation because they kept ignoring public health advice until it was too late. These deaths should not be on the prime minister's hands, vaccine delays or not.
With the announcement that the still-under-construction National Research Council facility in Montreal would start producing Novavax's vaccine by the end of the year pending Health Canada approval reignited the faux-debate over domestic vaccine production in this country, and the hysterical demands that the prime minister should have negotiated with these pharmaceutical companies to produce them here. Except they did try it has been explained over and over again that pre-pandemic, our domestic bio-manufacturing capacity had been allowed to atrophy under successive governments, which the current government quickly made investments in restoring once the pandemic happened, but that takes time. When we had vaccine candidates under consideration, these companies looked at what capacity we had and determined it was too limited to justify the expense of capital and expertise when existing facilities could manufacture at global scale.
The added complication with this is that different vaccines require different technologies to produce them, and what capacity we did have was only for certain types of vaccines. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are based on mRNA technology, which Canada currently does not have the technological capacity to produce at scale. In fact, almost nobody does, which is why these companies weren't able to outsource more production than they already have. Nevertheless, we have MPs and party leaders who either don't understand this distinction or who don't care to understand and are trying to pretend that we would have had the option to produce these domestically if only this government had bothered to negotiate properly. This is a complete fabrication, and yet it keeps coming up because not enough media outlets will call them out on this, nor will the government, who prefer to stick to their happy-clappy talking points about how diverse our vaccine portfolio is.
Another deliberate mischaracterization was added to the pile this week with news that Canada would be accepting doses from the COVAX facility, which has been falsely portrayed as a program devoted to getting doses to the developing world. Canada was one of the first and largest donors, where the program involved investing so that we get some production capacity while our orders give the facility the kind of leverage they need to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies in order to ensure equitable access to those developing countries. While the opposition calls it "embarrassing" or "humiliating" that we are taking these doses or falsely claiming that we are somehow taking them away from developing countries the government has not done enough to put the actual version of events forward until it's too late.
The current delays, chalked up to Pfizer retooling one of their production lines so that they can ramp up production, and Moderna facing certain unnamed "concerns in the manufacturing process," have everyone blaming the prime minister for this state of affairs, along with demands that he debase himself by throwing a public tantrum to the CEOs of those companies, as though that would do any good. He has no control over these delays, and it's extremely unlikely that anything we could have negotiated would have made the outcome any different.
This isn't to say that the federal government hasn't been blameless over the course of the pandemic, because they have had their own shortfalls, but it's hard to see how anyone else could have done anything differently in this situation. Part of accountability is holding the right people to account for the things that are their responsibility, which is why these attempts to deflect blame from the premiers for the bloodbaths that happened on their watches, due to their own negligence, is really concerning. Vaccines were never supposed to be the way out of this pandemic until much, much later in the year, and trying to pin this on Justin Trudeau is disingenuous, and ultimately dangerous.
Photo Credit: CBC News
