Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thanks to the committee for inviting me to speak.
My name is Joel Lexchin. I'm an emergency physician in downtown Toronto. I've been one for the past 39 years, and I taught health policy for 15 years at York University.
A lot of the points that I'm going to make have been made in one form or another already, so I'll just emphasize a few.
One of them is that when we came into the COVID pandemic, we lacked any manufacturing capability. This was partly because of the sale of Connaught to Mérieux, which is now part of Sanofi, in the late 1980s, and then the sale of Biochem Pharma in 2006, which was based in Quebec, to GlaxoSmithKline. While Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline continue to make vaccines here in Canada, they have decided not to make the COVID vaccine that they are jointly working on in Canada. Although they have plants here, they are not going to utilize them to make the vaccine if and when it gets approved.
We also had warnings about the need for a vaccine policy and domestic vaccine manufacturing. This came about through SARS in 2003. After SARS, David Naylor wrote a report emphasizing the need for a vaccine strategy and for a secure supply of vaccines. We seemed to ignore that. We had the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. The vaccine production in the plant in Sainte-Foy was delayed. We seemed to ignore that. Then we had ebola in 2014. Fortunately it didn't arrive in Canada, but we ignored that too.
We come to early 2020. We've ignored warnings, and we don't have any domestic capability to make a COVID vaccine. As a result, we ended up relying on a number of foreign-based companies manufacturing vaccines outside Canada, and we've seen currently what the results of that have been with Pfizer's delays and Moderna's delays.
In view of that, I offer four recommendations to the committee.
The first one is that we need to develop a national vaccine strategy that will consist of a strong and enduring financial commitment to publicly funded and publicly run vaccine research. As I said, this has been recommended before and largely ignored.
Secondly, we need to invest in a domestic, publicly owned vaccine manufacturing facility so that we can avoid the situation of a privately owned Canadian company being sold to foreign interests at some time in the future and, therefore, removing control from Canadian hands. That's what we have with the situation with Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline: manufacturing facilities based in Canada, decisions made outside Canada, and the decision not to manufacture their vaccine here in this country.
Thirdly, if we can't guarantee domestic vaccine production, Canada should issue compulsory licences to increase vaccine production.
Finally, in the future, if we're going to grant money for vaccine research and manufacturing to private companies or sign contracts for vaccines with private companies, we need to make those deals publicly known with the details so that we can understand what's happening and what's not happening in the country.
Thank you very much.