Thank you, Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to join you today.
As the former chair of the aboriginal affairs committee of the House of Commons, I acknowledge with respect that we live on the traditional lands of indigenous peoples from sea to sea to sea.
My name is Ken Hughes, and I have served as chair of the board of Providence Therapeutics for about four years. As a country, we are not yet where we want to be in protecting Canadians from this pandemic, yet Canada has exceptional public and private sector scientific, medical and business expertise—among the very best in the world. Unfortunately, we have not marshalled that capacity effectively. Never again should we have to rely upon other countries for vaccines or the science behind them.
Providence can have millions of doses of messenger RNA vaccine by this fall, the goal being October. We're on that path now, having recruited leading development and manufacturing expertise.
Last summer, decisions were made to buy large orders of vaccines from outside of Canada. The received wisdom was that we did not have the capacity to do it in Canada. Unfortunately, at that time, people focused only on the supply of vaccines for Canada for the pandemic as we all knew it then. There was little focus on how we prepare ourselves for a world beyond the immediate pandemic. Let's not make that mistake again.
Things have changed. First, emerging variants may enable the coronavirus to stay with us for the foreseeable future. Second, messenger RNA has been validated as an agile, highly effective and responsive vaccine platform. There are other Canadian vaccine teams that can contribute as well. Canadians can develop vaccines and manufacture them here. We can even blunt emerging variants of the virus. We can do it, but we won't do it just by inviting in branch plants of foreign companies. We do it by building up the domestic talent we have here already.
As America's closest neighbour, we have learned never to bet against America when they put their minds to something. They put their minds and billions of dollars behind Operation Warp Speed and, among other things, validated the messenger RNA platform for vaccines.
In the future, I would like the world to look at Canada and say, “You know, those Canadians—never bet against them.” That could be our future. We are here today specifically to ask the Canadian government to invest in Canadian capacity and help realize that future.
Thank you. I am pleased to turn it over to Brad Sorenson, CEO and founder of Providence Therapeutics.