I completely agree.
Early on, the efforts to find new vaccines were impressive. Many were developed. Now, pharmaceutical companies are signing confidential agreements with countries to deliver vaccines. We saw how quickly Pfizer-BioNTech ran into production issues—hence, this week's slowdown.
As for AstraZeneca, in Europe, the situation is much worse. Something of a trade war has erupted between Europe and the United Kingdom. If European countries want to prevent vaccine exports to the United Kingdom, under WTO rules, they have to prevent exports to Canada as well. We therefore find ourselves in a trade war where the companies are no longer able to fulfill their orders.
Countries adopted the strategy of lining up for pharmaceutical firms' vaccines and waiting for their doses, but now the doses aren't coming. What do they do now? It's late in the game to start coming up with new solutions.
Still, Canada has good vaccine production capacity—capacity that could be leveraged if royalty-free licences were offered on patents.