OTTAWA – A leading U.S. fitness expert Praises Canada for succumbing to “vaccine nationalism” for its efforts to drive a fair global distribution of a cure for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thomas Bollyky, director of the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations’ global fitness program, says it distinguishes Canada from the United States and European countries that they are taking steps to pre-purchase large quantities of viable vaccines for their own populations.
Bollyky says this equates to hoarding and would undermine joint efforts to neutralize COVID-19 in poor countries.
“Canada has a track record of what you can be proud of in this pandemic,” said Bollyky, who teaches law at Georgetown University, in an interview.
However, his own government will have to do much better, bollyky co-wrote in an essay to be published next month in Foreign Affairs magazine.
The perspective arises when the Trudeau government faces questions from fitness experts about why it is not doing more to fund national vaccine studies to prevent Canadians from having to wait in line, potentially for months, to find a cure for the newly discovered pandemic. in another. Country.
A senator and some fitness professionals urge the Minister of Innovation, Navdeep Bains, to avoid delaying a $35 million cash resolution through Providence Therapeutics in Toronto to initiate human trials of a new generation of experimental vaccines that has been largely funded in the United States. States.
Providence says it percentage of its experience worldwide and could supply five million doses of a vaccine to Canadians by mid-2021, but cannot go ahead with unfunded testing or production.
Bollyky said he knew nothing of Providence’s proposal, however, he said countries will have to percentage at least some of any viable vaccines created in their soil to eliminate the pandemic everywhere.
“If Canada invests in this CorporateArray … the fact that part of that source is being used to satisfy one’s own desires is fine,” Bollyky said in an interview.
“The question is: would Canada use all of its first materials to vaccinate and collect low-risk members of its population? Or will you participate in this allocation mechanism that allows other desires for precedence to be fulfilled in other countries before they are fulfilled. -risk members of your own country? “
Providence’s chief executive, Brad Sorenson, said his company would be willing to share his experience with vaccines internationally, but is frustrated that the government has responded to his proposal since May.
“If we were given the Canadian government, we would expand the vaccine in Canada,” Sorenson said in an interview.
“We would try to invest more and seek the technique of other countries at the level of Canada and Canada’s capabilities, and seek to build partnerships and expand the availability of this generation, to move this generation to other countries.”
In the trial, Bollyky and Chad P. Brown, principal investigator at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, first reject the Trump administration’s “oxygen mask” argument to American immunization. Well-known practice requires airline passengers to first place their own oxygen mask on a depressurizing aircraft, so they can help others, especially children.
“The main difference, of course, is that aircraft oxygen masks don’t just fall into the first elegance, which is the equivalent of what will happen when vaccines are despite everything you can have if governments don’t give them access to other people. in other countries,” Bollyky writes. and brown.
Bains spokesman John Power said the government was “working on every conceivable front to provide Canadians with safe and effective remedies and vaccines that oppose COVID-19.”
“This includes investments in building the production capacity of Canadian vaccines, money for Canadian vaccine applicants as a component of Canada’s contribution to the global vaccine effort, and participation in the component with the maximum of promising foreign applicants.
Canada has also invested more than $1 billion in foreign cooperation efforts to locate a vaccine. One of them is the World Health Organization’s COVAX Center, where countries will “significant the dangers of accessing a broad portfolio of candidate vaccines,” Power said.
COVAX is the world’s bulk vaccine procurement programme and is intended to provide two billion doses of vaccines that are safe, effective and approved by WHO until the end of 2021, he said.
Power said vaccines would be delivered to all countries in proportion to their population, and that fitness personnel would be the beneficiary.
After that, vaccines would be expanded to cover 20% of the population of participating countries, he said.
“Further doses will then be made available based on a country’s needs, vulnerability and COVID-19 threat,” said Power.
This report from The Canadian Press was first published on July 29, 2020.