It proves that Canada could have done it last year and Canada failed.
I'll just quote from a report by the British biotech industry advocates, similar to BIOTECanada. Mr. Casey will know that Britain has an organization very similar to his.
Last year, they wrote that “the UK has limited or no vaccine manufacturing capability”. What did they mean by that?
They meant that the U.K. had only the capacity of 200 litres of cell culture growth capacity to make the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. Two hundred litres isn't a lot, but at the end of 2019, the National Research Council had 500 litres capacity. We had more capacity in this country going into COVID than the British did, yet the British stepped up. They made use of their limited capacity in 2020. They really expanded it quickly.
That's what their vaccine task force did that ours failed to do, and now look where they are. They're manufacturing, and soon they'll be exporting. That was done in one year, and it was able to be done because there are single-use bioreactor technologies around the world that Canada just hasn't adopted. We blew it—and our vaccine task force blew it—in not doing that.
I want to add one last thing to this answer. At the end of 2019, when COVID hit, there was only one facility in the world that had ever made an adenovirus-based vaccine and commercialized it. That's the technology used by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. That laboratory was Canada's NRC. We were the only ones in the world to ever commercialize that vaccine. We got there first, yet that capacity was unused in 2020, and today it's still unused.