Home Remedies : How Should Canada Acquire Vaccines for the Next Pandemic?

The frequency of viral outbreaks and pandemics in the last two decades, including the current COVID pandemic, has focussed attention on Canada’s pandemic preparedness generally and its pandemic vaccine development and production self-sufficiency, in particular. As Canada faced disruptions in the supply of COVID vaccines from other countries, there were numerous calls for a public agency that would be charged with pandemic vaccine production and possibly vaccine development as well.In this paper, we review the prospects for such an agency and note that it would be risky to rely on it to rapidly develop and test a vaccine, given the high failure rates for vaccine development projects and logistical challenges in mounting a large-scale clinical trial in short order. But a public agency that instead focussed on producing vaccines licensed from domestic or international developers would also face challenges. The primary issue is one of production readiness. Practically, production facilities need to be operating continuously at or near full-scale capacity to hone the processes needed to meet stringent and evolving regulatory standards and ensure personnel have sufficient experience. Facilities also need a reliable supply of key inputs. The public agency would thus need to be engaged in full-scale vaccine production even in non-pandemic times to maintain both production know-how and stable input supply chains. It would need to do so in three production platforms that may be needed to produce vaccines for the next pandemic virus. This raises the question of what vaccines the agency would routinely produce, in non-pandemic times, and where the vaccines would be distributed.Our view is that Canada can achieve a more reliable supply of vaccines for future pandemics, and at lower cost, by contracting with existing commercial producers that are already engaged in continuous and full-scale production and who thus have demonstrated technical competency and have secure input supply chains. The government can purchase either reserve capacity in existing domestic commercial production facilities or can cover the cost of an adjacent modular production facility that can thus tap into the steam, gas and other utilities needed to run the facility. The number and capacity of the vaccine manufacturing platforms that Canada requires depends on whether Canada can negotiate an agreement with other countries that allows each country to specialize in a platform and share pandemic vaccines with partners should the need arise. Regardless of its approach, however, Canada needs to act soon if we are to be ready for the next pandemic