Foreign Affairs Committee on May 9th, 2022

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you so much Mr. Chair.

Again, thank you to our witnesses. I'm going to put this question to Dr. Pai, and if we have time, to Dr. Gagnon.

We have a system right now, CAMR. We can see very clearly that it's a system that does not work. We heard testimony about that earlier. We have a TRIPS waiver that the government has intentionally not made a decision on, and because it hasn't made a decision, that is, in effect, a decision. We've seen examples of hoarding and not giving the vaccines that we could.

Do you feel that the Canadian government has stopped action and, in effect, its failure to act or make decisions is, in fact, an action in and of itself?

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

How can it not be a global crisis? Every month, millions of people are affected by this crisis.

I'll just give you India as an example. In just three months, April, May and June of last year, 2.7 million Indians died. That is almost a million deaths a month. That is how devastating this virus can be. Every year we fail to act is adding more and more deaths and economic losses.

To me, time is of the essence. Just sitting on this for years and years.... The fact that we're even doing a study on vaccine equity in the third year is so disappointing to me in and of itself. What is there to study? We have to act. Lives are at stake, and our own security is at stake. Canada will pay for this. I'm sorry. We will be suffering for many months to come if we don't act purely out of selfishness. If we don't want to do the right thing for altruistic reasons, fine. Let's do it for pure selfish internal-looking reasons. Let's do the right thing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you, Dr. Pai, and thank you, Ms. McPherson.

Mr. Aboultaif, please go ahead for three minutes.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Dr. Pai and Dr. Gagnon, I'll go back to the obstacles to providing the vaccine and getting this whole process going from A to Z without any interruption.

Could the two of you list, in priority, what the obstacles looked like, from the patents and licensing to the delivery of the vaccines, to the infrastructure and the resources that you had on the donor side and recipient side? Would you be able to list, in priority, where the obstacles were for a complete vaccination to take place?

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

To me, the biggest obstacle was that the richest nations essentially cornered all of the vaccine supply last year. There was virtually nothing available for low- and middle-income countries. COVAX donations came down to a trickle. The world just sat by and allowed this virus to run through the whole place. To prevent this from happening again and again, we need architectural changes—

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

I'm interested in a whole list of priorities, not just—

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

You would need to give me more than 60 seconds to give you the list. My point is that we need structural changes, and we need money and then—

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

It would be nice if you could summarize it.

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

Yes, I'm trying.

Like I said, there are structural changes that prevented low-income countries from getting supply. Now that there is a supply, they are struggling to vaccinate because they don't have the resources to deliver them.

We need to fix both. We need a short, predictable supply. Countries need to be self-reliant on their own and not depend on our charity, or anybody else's charity. They need their own delivery mechanisms that the world should be supporting.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Thank you. That's fair enough.

Dr. Gagnon, can you comment on that too, please?

[Dr. Marc-André Gagnon]

The first thing would be to list COVID-19 treatments and vaccines under schedule 1 of the Patent Act and support the TRIPS waiver.

What for me is very important.... Basically, we had massive public subsidies and advanced market agreements in order to make sure that we were de-risking investment to make sure we moved as fast as possible.

We need to make sure that these alternatives to patents can be used when necessary. When countries get together, it's just, “Okay, we will be publicly and massively funding this,” but then they should not stick with structures where the production of scarcity is central to the profitability of some of the stakeholders.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Aboultaif.

Our final intervention this afternoon goes to Mr. Sarai for three minutes.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

Thank you.

My first question goes to Mr. Pai. You used India as an example of four and a half million people dying, but India is a manufacturer and has two of the largest manufacturing facilities in the world, producing up to 160 million or 190 million vaccines a month. My understanding, from what I have read, is that their deaths have nothing to do with the availability of vaccines, but the fact that they had one of the world's largest fairs. Over 100 million people came to one place in the country and then merged back. They also didn't use the actual vaccines they produced and had.

How would a TRIPS waiver help a place like India, when they already had 200 million doses a month being manufactured?

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

Firstly, you're right. There are lots of things that went wrong in India, and I wrote a whole article on it in The Washington Post. For sure, there were missteps, but when the delta wave emerged in India, only 10% of India was vaccinated. Essentially, this deadly little strain of the virus ripped through the whole country, and that led to the carnage. Yes, India could have done many things to limit the spread of the virus.

The TRIPS waiver may not necessarily help a country like India, China or Russia. The big BRIC countries are not what we are really worried about. We are worried about many other countries, especially on the African continent, where after all of these decades and centuries, they do not have the ability to manufacture their own vaccines. It's not just for COVID. They can't even make a malaria rapid test on the continent, despite having the most malaria anywhere in the world.

My plea is to have domestic manufacturing on the African continent, which is the best way to prepare the continent for whatever is coming next.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

On that same note, I find that a bit surprising too, because people who have manufacturing facilities can't get the materials for them. Even if you get the patent or the formula to make it, if you can't get the raw materials, it doesn't solve the problem. When a pandemic happens, the whole world is seeking the same ingredients and, therefore, even if they have manufacturing facilities, I don't see how they could solve that problem.

You will always have concentration of manufacturing in places that can specialize in it and make millions daily, if not hundreds of millions monthly. The problem is a lot more complex than giving a waiver of some sort, because when you come to things like this, you also have to have the ingredients and the manufacturing ability to make it and the wherewithal and the will of the country to deliver those.

We're noticing that more of a problem is not so much the vaccines' availability as delivering them into the arms that need them. How we improve that is the real issue, rather than giving rights to manufacture them without giving the necessary ingredients and the ability to put them in people's arms.

[Dr. Madhukar Pai]

We all agree that this is a multi-faceted problem that requires multiple interventions. The TRIPS waiver is only one among them.

[Randeep Sarai, Liberal, Surrey Centre, BC]

I'm trying to—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Mr. Sarai, I apologize. We'll have to leave it there. You're a bit over your time.

Colleagues, on our collective behalf, I'd like to thank Professor Gagnon and Dr. Pai for their expertise, for their appearance today and for their testimony.

Thank you very much. We're very grateful to you.

With that, colleagues, we'll ask our witnesses to disconnect. We will take a moment to resurface in camera for a discussion on drafting instructions on this report.

The meeting is suspended for a couple of minutes.

[Proceedings continue in camera]