The news came a day earlier, but Canadian leaders and biotech company Moderna officially announced on Friday that a new vaccine plant would be set up in Montreal to help ensure a long-term supply of vaccines made in Canada.
“Our government has promised to strengthen our capacity to produce vaccines” here in Canada, “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a statement at McGill University in Montreal.
Canada already has a notorious trajectory over the past few decades of building first-class vaccine research, but dismantling its domestic capacity to actually produce vaccines, leaving it dependent on vaccine facilities in other countries.
The facility, which is expected to be operational by 2024, will employ 200 to 300 people and will be able to produce up to 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine a year, Trudeau said.
But it will also eventually be able to do research and hopefully produce other types of vaccines or treatments based on the same mRNA or messenger RNA technology that was first used in COVID-19 vaccines, he said.
“It will also have a significant impact on the research they are doing on a number of diseases. We talked about Alzheimer’s disease, we talked about cancer, we talked about the set of things that information RNA is able to deliver to keep Canadians and people around the world healthy, “Trudeau said.
“And Canada, which has long been a leader in mRNA research, will now be a leader in delivering mRNA to Canadians and the world.”
The founder and chairman of the Moderna board has deep ties to Montreal, where his family fled after fleeing the Lebanese civil war. He attended Loyola and McGill College before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
Moderna, which was founded in 2010, is still based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The company’s CEO, Stefan Bansel, joined Trudeau and Quebec Prime Minister Francois Lego for the announcement, saying Moderna’s path over the past two years has been dramatic as it races to develop and approve its mRNA vaccine for the first time. .
“People forget that Moderna was losing money in 2020,” he said. “We did not have the financial means to start this industrial machine. And Canada was one of the few, a few countries that were here to help, “making one of the first pre-orders for the vaccine and sending a lot – I needed money,” he said.
Now, with tested, approved and widely used mRNA vaccines – Moderna and Pfizer are using the technology – for the “first time in the history of medicine, we have an information molecule,” Bansel said.
“And that changes everything. It’s like adding a blockbuster to Netflix. It’s a paradigm shift.”
Moderna has also signed a collaboration agreement with McGill, which allows it to benefit from university scientists while sharing patented pharmaceutical information with them.
CEMENT QUEBACK FACILITY AS A BIOTECHNICAL HUB: PRIME MINISTER
Quebec also has high hopes for the new facility, but in a slightly different way.
Lego joked that he and Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford knew that both of their provinces were fighting to host the new facility.
“What a wonderful day,” Lego said, laughing.
“It is a great pleasure for me to say that Quebec has won the battle,” he said. “He will not be in Ontario, he will be in Quebec, Doug, so it is a beautiful victory.
More seriously, he said Quebec has already amassed many pharmaceutical and biotech companies to set up offices here – 700 companies, he said, employing 36,000 people – and that he hopes the arrival of a giant like Moderna will help crystallize the place. of the province as the center of the field.
“With Moderna, we are adding a key player to help structure our cluster,” he said.
Provincial Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said it took “several months of efforts” to persuade Moderna to choose Quebec as the site for the new factory.
STRENGTHENING “HIGH PROFIT MARGINS”, INEQUALITY, CRITICS SAY
However, not everyone celebrates the announcement. The NGO Council of Canadians says all Canadians must oppose the government, which is working hard on profitable private vaccine production, which has helped cut off access to millions of vaccines in less affluent countries.
The facility may expand access to vaccines for Canadians in the future, but “our governments should not invest in companies that have consistently prioritized their own profits at the expense of global public health,” the Canadian Council said in a statement.
“Instead of unfolding the red carpet for private vaccine manufacturers, our leaders must do everything possible to increase the capacity to produce public property,” said Christina Warner, co-executive director of the group.
The answer to Canada’s depleted domestic capacity is not to invite large pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Warner said.
“Private pharmaceutical companies like Moderna have denied millions of people around the world access to life-saving vaccines during the pandemic, increasing their own profits,” she said.
The group said that of the 670 million doses of vaccine it produced in 2021, Moderna supplies only two percent to low-income countries.
Its sales to richer countries come with “huge profit margins”, and it also opposes the World Trade Organization’s proposal to relinquish intellectual property rights to COVID vaccines and refuses to share its mRNA technology with other countries.
SECOND WAX FACTORY IS ALREADY WORKING IN MONREAL
This facility will not be the only one in Montreal. Canada announced much earlier in the pandemic that it would transform the Royalmount vaccine facility – already used for similar science by the National Research Council – to allow it to mass-produce vaccines against COVID-19.
It was not clear which vaccines the site would produce or whether production had already begun. The National Research Council has not yet responded to a request for an update.
Canada has struck two deals with vaccine companies associated with the facility: Novaland-based Novavax and Vancouver-based Precision NanoSystems.
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