Thank you.
I'm Professor Amir Attaran. By way of background, I'm a scientist. My Ph.D. is in cell biology and immunology from Oxford. I'm a lawyer. I've worked in the pharmaceutical industry, including on a project where we had to increase production 6,000% in one year, so I feel the pain of those in industry who have to step up to this right now.
I want to talk about what has brought us to this point. I'm going to list eight things.
The first is that Canada was slow when competition for vaccine purchases and partnerships was intense last spring and summer. We were weeks or months slower off the mark than peer countries. Who has ever heard of the last-mover advantage? It doesn't exist.
The second point is that we did not manufacture the only vaccine that we could have done, which is the Oxford-AstraZeneca one, and which was available to us and other countries under a licence. Since that time, the Prime Minister has oddly blamed this on Brian Mulroney. That isn't really true, because a careful study shows that Britain itself did not have as much vaccine manufacturing capacity at the beginning of 2020 as Canada did. Canada had more.
They stepped on it. They built capacity in months. They are now nearly the best in the world at vaccination. We are around 40th place, and that's a big problem. Every day, the British vaccinate a huge number of people that we don't. The Americans vaccinate more people every day than Canada has in the last two months combined.
Third, compared with those countries, our vaccine task force is shockingly secretive. As late as July last year the government would not even release the names of the participants on the vaccine task force, much less the work plan, much less the minutes of their meetings, which are still secret. We now see the result of that. Unfortunately, the co-chair, Dr. Joanne Langley is now embarking on a media tour to rewrite history and say that the task force did a good job. It patently didn't, given where we are today.
Fourth, our government put the wrong ministry in charge. Every single successful country at this—the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Chile—put the health ministry in the lead, but in Canada, vaccines have been led by the industry ministry and procurement, as if we are building a bridge or procuring toilet paper, which is not the case. The health ministry in Canada is conspicuous in its absence.
Fifth, when all this was realized, Anita Anand, apparently with PMO approval, ran around in agitated anguish trying to sign any vaccine deal she could. We've signed more than any other country in the world, yet some of the deals we've signed are with companies that can't deliver in 2021. Some of them won't be able to deliver in 2022. Some of them, and we've heard from one this morning, perhaps will never deliver. It seems that in panic what we did was become less strategic rather than more.
Sixth, much of this institutional failure I've outlined is because Canada's science establishment—and I underscore this—is plain inferior to our peer countries. We have no Tony Fauci, not even close. On the contrary, the Prime Minister's chief science adviser, Dr. Mona Nemer, has issued three statements, precisely three, since coming into the office years ago. Two of the three are on election financing and Canada Day. That's not science. She has, with the help of outside committees during COVID, issued three fairly low-quality reports on COVID science. In contrast, little Switzerland has issued over 70 reports from its COVID task force.
Seventh, these indications of disaster were just not heeded. Journalists have been writing about this for a long time. I wrote a desperate warning last August in Maclean's that we were heading for vaccine failure and I was quite ignored, as were the journalists' warnings. I even personally wrote to the Prime Minister's Office in August. There was no dialogue set up with that until November, so we have an insular government as well that is hurting us here.
Here is my final point. Even today, I'm not confident that good ideas are being heard, and that's critical to our security and I'll explain why in questions.
Thank you very much.