Thank you so much.
Honourable members of the committee, I'm pleased to speak to you today. It's been approximately one year since I last appeared before you, and it has been a year like no other. While we have had many surprises, perhaps most surprising to me is the degree to which this pandemic has met our pre-pandemic expectations of the origins and course of such an event.
As predicted, a virulent pandemic emerged at the human-animal interface when an animal virus crossed the species barrier. Our fear is focused on a pathogen that combines virulents and transmissibility, and SARS-CoV-2 has done that par excellence. The contours of this pandemic, both in terms of timing and societal disagreement around masks, business and school closures, also directly echoed the 1918-19 influenza pandemic.
I'm sure that many of you, like me, wish that we were further along in vaccinating all Canadians against SARS-CoV-2. As with the control of the pandemic itself, Canada is neither at the front nor the back of the pack. We are getting there. Long-term care facilities across the country are largely vaccinated, and that has led to a marked reduction in daily deaths from SARS-CoV-2. However, as a friend recently remarked, Canada doesn't have a “let's finish in the middle of the pack” program for the Olympics. We have an own the podium program. We have the smarts, and the resources to be at the front of the pack.
Better performance in a crisis like this depends on strong systems, which unfortunately can't be created overnight. As they say, it's hard to build the airplane when you're trying to land it. Public health funding in Canada may be a victim of its own success. When public health systems are functioning well, they are silent, but they allow other sectors of our economy to thrive.
Unfortunately, the conditions that created our current pandemic will not disappear when this is over. Environmental degradation, climate change, illicit trade in wildlife, and risky laboratory work are all likely to continue, making a recurrence of a similar event fairly likely. As such, I'd like to look forward rather than backward, and talk about what we might build out of this experience in order to protect Canadians in the event of a future severe pandemic, with a focus on vaccination.
Vaccines are the door out of the current crisis for the simple reason that it isn't the virus that creates a pandemic, but rather widespread susceptibility to a new virus. Vaccines remove that vulnerability. The frustrations related to COVID-19 reflect weaknesses in two major areas, neither of which appeared overnight, and neither of which can be resolved with a snap of the fingers.
First, vaccination data systems across the country are weak or non-existent. Second, while we have a rich history of vaccine-related innovation in Canada, the path from innovation to commercialization seems to be a challenging one, and our ability to manufacture vaccines in Canada is limited.
In discussions with colleagues, it has emerged that notwithstanding spending around half a billion dollars annually on vaccines, we lack national or even well-functioning provincial appointment systems, vaccine registries and adverse event surveillance systems. We even lack common terminology across provinces to create such systems. These systems are now being built perforce during a national crisis. They need to be strengthened, integrated and maintained when the pandemic is over, both because they'll allow us to immunize more efficiently and effectively in peacetime, and also because they'll be a key strategic asset when the next pandemic occurs.
Similarly, delays in acquisition of vaccine supply underscore the importance of building strong manufacturing capacity for vaccines here in Canada. The era of vaccine companies as university-owned entities or Crown corporations like Connaught is long gone, but we have tremendous innovation in the vaccine space in Canada.
The Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine may represent a new paradigm for partnerships between smaller companies and global vaccine manufacturers, and could provide a pathway for Canadian innovators too. I'm also delighted to see that we will soon be manufacturing the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine here in Canada.
A key advantage of partnering with global firms relates to the global nature of communicable diseases. For example, it's important for companies to trial vaccines in other countries where novel SARS-CoV-2 variants are emerging.
In closing, this pandemic has made it clear that strong public health systems and vaccines are strategic assets that need to be actively maintained for the protection of Canadians, just as we would maintain a strong and competent military. As with the military, we don't want to be strong so we can get into fights, we want strength so we can protect ourselves from threats like SARS-CoV-2 that are likely to continue to emerge in the years ahead.