Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by thanking my colleague from Saanich—Gulf Islands for proposing this evening's debate. I think she will be happy to hear me say that I think she is well-intentioned.
As I was drafting my remarks for this evening, I was thinking about how one can be well-intentioned in a debate like this one. We must indeed be well-intentioned. The tricky thing about being an MP is that one is expected to be an expert on everything. Well, we cannot be, especially not on a subject as important as the vaccine.
To be honest, the notorious Indian variant is starting to scare me a little. I have been reading about the Indian variant, and I am starting to fear for my constituents and the general public.
I was wondering what I might say tonight that could help advance our fight against COVID-19. The answer is simple: We have to leave it up to the experts and listen to what science has to say.
Unfortunately, we cannot invite experts to participate in emergency debates in Parliament, but I would like to tell other members what some colleagues and I have been doing in recent weeks. We have been talking to researchers and vaccine experts, and I would like to share what they told us with the House.
First, one of the fundamental problems we have in Canada is basic research funding. During the various meetings I attended, several stakeholders reminded me that everyone is familiar with the famous Naylor report on the state of research. That report, which was presented in 2017, demonstrates that there was a gap under the Harper government. I do not mean to point any fingers, but unfortunately, there has been a bit of a gap in research funding, which has destabilized the basic research sector.
I will now share a statistic that bothers me. The Canadian Institutes of Health Research only accepts seven out of 48 applications received. This means that top health researchers in our country have to go through two or three rounds of review before one of their research projects is accepted. All the researchers told me that it was completely discouraging. Not only is this extremely discouraging, but we now know that the pandemic has also lit a fire under the United States, and officials there are in the process of increasing funding as much as they possibly can. The United States will be extremely attractive over the next few years, while we, meanwhile, risk losing that expertise.
Most people told me about this. They also told me that in the early 2000s, before this unfortunate gap, almost 30% of applications were approved. Today, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research approve 15% of researchers' applications.
If I wanted to do something constructive and I listened to what these research experts are saying, I would ask all my colleagues to increase this rate to 25%. That is what everyone told me. Approving about 25% of applications would perhaps help create an ecosystem that would also result in much more meaningful advances in local vaccine production. This important aspect of basic research is being ignored.
I do not want to criticize the Liberal government's efforts right now. I will perhaps come back to that a little later.
Another key point, which was raised by several people, is that there may be a disconnect in this strategy. There is no link between the department of health and the department of innovation and yet all the experts have told us that this link is necessary.
The success of certain vaccines, such as the AstraZeneca vaccine, was predicated on the ability of putting together several different platforms and gathering different profiles, that is, several actors in the health and research sectors. According to several experts we consulted, producing a vaccine in just over a year has been a major success story made possible by this magic formula.
In the interests of staying constructive, as I was saying earlier, I want to say that I have heard we should not focus on just one platform. I am not going to criticize the Liberal government, since everyone knows that that is not my thing, but I do think it just repeated the same mistake.
The government recently announced funding for Sanofi. People who understand about how vaccines work know that there are several different platforms. There is the RNA platform, which is an amazing discovery. There are other platforms that use eggs as bioreactors, like Sanofi's traditional, and somewhat outdated, platform. Then there is the very promising platform put forward by Medicago. I am not here to blame anyone, but it was a bit of a challenge dealing with the government.
I advocated many times for Medicago to get funding. We were four or five months behind, but who knows where we could have been if Medicago had gotten funding. This platform uses plants as bioreactors, which is a highly innovative technology.
Experts tell me that the government may be going down the wrong path by putting all its eggs in one basket with Sanofi. What happens in the future remains to be seen, but I believe that as soon as a government starts making decisions based on political concerns instead of science, it is on the wrong track.
That is the message I would like everyone to take away this evening. During a pandemic, it is never a good idea to make decisions based on political concerns, when the focus should be on scientific concerns and on what the science is telling us.
I will give another example of something that bothered me. I had discussions with Dr. Gary Kobinger. I can name him because he came forward. He was part of the COVID-19 vaccine task force, which was tasked with coming up with the protocol for the vaccines that Canada would use. What Canada did with CanSino is a classic example of a political decision. Most experts told the government not to move forward with what CanSino was proposing. The government did it anyway, and it ended in disaster.
Dr. Kobinger offered some interesting ideas for solutions, but I get the impression that because he did not exactly toe the line, the government sidelined him.
When I see a debate like the one we are having this evening, I think we could all afford to show some humility as legislators. Maybe we should all allow the science to take precedence.
We will see how the government reacts in the coming weeks in its recovery plan and all that. We will see whether there is funding for basic research and whether the government will agree to listen to what the experts are advising with regard to vaccine platforms.