Foreign Affairs Committee on April 4th, 2022

[Brittany Lambert]

Clearly, with this pandemic and all the other crises that the world is facing—climate, the economic repercussions of the pandemic, conflict, global displacement—we need the ODA to go up to be able to support the world with the long-term fallout of this pandemic. I would strongly urge the government to ensure that any.... It's great if it can get credit for its vaccine donations, but it needs to increase ODA proportionately.

Vaccine inequality has prolonged the pandemic. It has reversed some of the fragile women's rights gains that we were making, thanks to wonderful investments like those of the feminist international assistance policy. In that sense, I would say that vaccine inequity has threatened, or is threatening, the ambitions and the achievements of the feminist international assistance policy.

It's in Canadian interests, if we don't want to see the wonderful work that we've done and invested in go to waste, to make sure that we increase international assistance rates to compensate for what's happening and the extra money we need to spend on vaccines.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Ms. McPherson, thank you very much.

Colleagues, I'm going to correct myself. We do have time for a brief second round, albeit compressed. I would propose that we do three-minute and one-and-a-half-minute rotations. That way, we'll sneak in just past 12 o'clock, I believe.

If that's okay with colleagues, Mr. Morantz will be leading us off for three minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Given the limited time, I want to focus on the Medicago vaccine company and its production of a Covifenz vaccine. I'll direct my question to Oxfam, because their representative mentioned concerns about Canada being able to meet its COVAX obligations. That was Ms. Sarosi, I think.

As you may be aware, the Government of Canada provided a SIF grant of $173 million to Medicago to produce a made-in-Canada vaccine, which was intended for a number of purposes. One was to enable Canada to meet its COVAX obligations. This was confirmed by Minister Sajjan in media articles. It was denied by the public service when I questioned the public service about it in the last meeting about vaccine equity.

Do you have any concerns about that? The WHO has said specifically that Covifenz will not be approved for emergency use. In fact, it went so far as to say that “there is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the tobacco industry's interests and public health policy interests”. Why did it say that? It said that because Philip Morris International, which is a tobacco company, owns a roughly one-third stake in Medicago.

Could you comment on that situation?

[Brittany Lambert]

I apologize. I can't comment on that specific situation. I don't know the details.

My hope is that Canada can.... Obviously, I want to see Canada be able to donate as many vaccines that are useful to the developing world as possible, but I don't know the ins and outs and politics of that situation.

[Marty Morantz, Conservative, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Do any of the other panellists have any knowledge of that issue? No.

I'll leave it to you to look into it. Obviously, Canada's obligations to COVAX are very serious international obligations, so it might be of interest to you to find out that Canada is going to have a lot of difficulty meeting its 200-million-dose obligation. This is because of the fact that the proper due diligence wasn't done when 173 million taxpayer dollars were invested in a company that is producing a vaccine that cannot be used outside of our borders for emergency use.

Those are my questions, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Morantz. Thank you for sticking to the time limits.

Mr. Sarai, you have three minutes.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you.

I want to thank the witnesses for giving insight on this. This is an ongoing issue, and it is still a pretty pressing issue, even though we see that rates in Canada have gone down and vaccine uptake is very high.

I would like to find out if any of the witnesses can elaborate on how practical a TRIPS waiver would be, taking in the time...how long it would take to build a facility specifically for the mRNA type of vaccines, which would procure the ingredients and manufacture and deliver vaccines.

We've seen that here, even though funding support announcements were made immediately when COVID-19 happened, the facilities are just coming up now. It takes almost two years.

Even if we were to do a TRIPS waiver—if the world were able to do that—how practical would it be? Would facilities be up and running and getting ingredients? If it takes the same timeline in Canada or the western world, it would essentially take almost two years. I don't know if that has been taken into account.

Can somebody elaborate on that?

[Diana Sarosi]

I can jump in on this issue.

A study by MSF has already shown that about 100 companies are ready to manufacture these vaccines around the world. Obviously, nothing is going to happen overnight and there need to be adjustments made. These are companies that are already producing vaccines and medication for all kinds of other diseases, so it's really a matter of adjusting it.

The other thing to consider as part of it is the amount of time it takes to do clinical trials. Trying to manufacture a new vaccine takes a long time, because you have to spend a long time doing clinical trials. That time could really be reduced if there was a possibility to share the knowledge and the technology so that we don't have to do these extensive clinical trials anymore.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

What's the cause of the slow uptake, even in places like China, which manufactures its own vaccine and where they have a fairly robust system of delivery and procurement, and their levels are very low? We see the uptake load. It's not a matter of pure availability, but also hesitancy or other factors.

Can anyone elaborate on the Chinese situation, where it's almost one-sixth of the population of the world?

[Diana Sarosi]

I can elaborate on that, which also includes the situation in Hong Kong.

China has pursued a policy of zero COVID cases. From the start the Chinese policy was they're not going to let it in; they're going to focus on the testing. As soon as there was a case, they kept it isolated and took it out of society, basically. It's come down to this omicron variant for them to realize this policy is not sustainable.

In terms of hesitancy, I want to bring up one recent study by the Partnership for Evidence-Based Response to COVID-19. It showed that an overwhelming majority of people in Africa, 78% of people surveyed across 19 countries, are willing to get vaccinated.

Hesitancy is not particularly higher in developing countries than in developed countries. People want to get vaccinated everywhere, but having this charitable approach whereby countries never know when they're going to get vaccines and how soon they're going to expire makes it very difficult to get these vaccines into people's arms.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

My apologies, Ms. Sarosi and Ms. Sarai, but in the interests of time, we'll have to move on.

Thank you very much.

I will now give Ms. Normandin the floor for a very short, minute-and-a-half intervention.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I will be very brief.

There has been a lot of talk about state obligations in terms of human rights and the right to health. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there are no penalties for failure to honour those obligations. Maybe that is why nothing concrete is happening. Pharmaceutical companies are powerful lobbyists and they're putting a lot of pressure on governments to not sign on to the TRIPS waiver.

Would be a good idea for a future treaty on pandemics to include sanctions against states that fail to fulfill their human rights and right to health obligations?

[France-Isabelle Langlois]

That is a good question.

Generally speaking, international obligations are not backed by sanctions. Rather, countries themselves impose their own sanctions, by which I mean that they give themselves the legislative tools to ensure they respect their international commitments.

It is after all a moral engagement. International treaties encourage compliance with commitments.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

In this case, the pharmaceutical lobby is tipping the balance one way. Would it be a good idea to have sanctions to even things out?

[France-Isabelle Langlois]

I think it's very important to have a counterweight to the pharmaceutical companies' excessive power. Government needs to matter more than private sector economic interests. That is the main thing to work on. There are national economic interests tied to the economic interests of pharmaceutical companies, and that is the problem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Ms. Normandin.

Ms. McPherson, please, you have one and a half minutes.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to our witnesses.

I have one very quick question for Ms. Langlois.

We are now two years into this pandemic and we're going into the third year.

Can you give me what you believe—please be blunt—to be the primary reason the Canadian government has not acted on the TRIPS waiver and has vacillated and sat on the fence for the last two years? Can you give me the primary reason for that, please?

[France-Isabelle Langlois]

My hunch is that it is for economic reasons. Canada, like other countries, is in negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to gain access to supply. We do not know how much each country paid for the vaccines or the treatments, but we do know that the prices are not the same from one country to the next. There are also negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to have local facilities so that we can produce our own vaccines. Unfortunately, that is hanging in the balance. On one hand, we do not want to put ourselves at odds with the pharmaceutical companies we are negotiating with; on the other hand, we should be putting much stronger political pressure on these companies.

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

In effect, you're saying that the Canadian government has enabled the pharmaceutical companies around the world to have the power over life and death and has not pushed for tools that could in fact make sure that vaccine equity is a reality around the world.

[France-Isabelle Langlois]

Exactly.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Ms. McPherson.

Mr. Aboultaif, you have three minutes.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

I hear today that there are a lot of politics around this whole issue. One of them is using the product from Medicago, from which millions of doses were ordered for donation to COVAX. They were denied because of the involvement of a third party or an investment company in the manufacturing or in the private sector in Canada.

Isn't that also part of the politics? Do you see it in that fashion?

Why would you deny giving or accepting these vaccinations that are available for the world where they're most needed, for reasons such as these?

That question can be for any of the witnesses, such as Oxfam.

[Brittany Lambert]

As I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, I'm not familiar with the details of this case, so I can't comment.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

That's a conversation about the availability of vaccine and waiting for that, and the deaths that have taken place in many parts of the world. Oxfam is one of the organizations on the ground that are operating and trying to help these countries that don't have vaccinations available.

Isn't that part of the politics, too?

[Brittany Lambert]

It sounds like it may be, but I don't know the entire situation.

For sure, we're watching the types of vaccines that Canada is donating. I know that so far there's been more AstraZeneca. That is causing some challenges. A lot of countries are having difficulty placing them, because a lot of countries don't want them now that evidence has emerged showing that mRNA vaccines are more effective against omicron in particular.

We're also watching.... I know they have donated some Moderna. In terms of Pfizer and Novavax, there's no clarity yet on whether Canada will be donating any of those. I think many countries would like to know.

Unfortunately, I do not know the details of the Medicago case.