Canadian Politics Today

... in regards Canadian capabilities to produce vaccines... directly or under license:

as the world's first Phase 2 clinical trial, Canada's National Research Council (NRC) partnered with China's CanSino Biologics in developing the Ad5-nCoV vaccine leveraging NRC's proprietary 'HEC293 Cell Line'... which also included collaboration with the Canadian Immunization Research Network at the Canadian Center for Vaccinology. More pointedly, that collaboration allowed the NRC to advance a scale-up production process for the vaccine candidate; one relying upon Government of Canada funding to support upgrades to the NRC’s facilities in Montreal to enable compliance standards to ensure readiness for Canadian bioprocessing of potential vaccine candidates as they become available.

as I mentioned in an earlier Aug 17 post, this latest announcement is over and above the financial support the Government of Canada initially provided for upgrades to the existing NRC Royalmount Avenue biomanufacturing facility in Montréal; specifically, upgrades to complete in late 2020/early 2021. As for today's latest announcement concerning a new NRC facility... with a completion timeline must sooner than your stated 'will take two years (hopefully)' period; specifically:

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Quote from: waldo on August 29, 2020, 11:58:28 am

as for the Canadian government's financial support of Canadian companies for vaccine development initiatives:
=> Variation Biotechnologies Inc. (VBI),
=> Medicago,
=> IMV Ltd,
=> VIDO-Intervac

PM Trudeau announces plan to purchase 76 million doses of Canadian-made COVID-19 vaccine

Quote

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau today announced another contract to buy a promising COVID-19 vaccine now in development — part of a plan to secure millions of vaccine doses to inoculate Canadians from the novel coronavirus.

Trudeau said the government has signed a contract to procure 76 million doses from the Quebec City-biotech company Medicago.

Medicago is developing the vaccine in partnership with the British drug company GlaxoSmithKline. The two companies have said its pre-clinical results show the vaccine demonstrated a "high level of neutralizing antibodies following a single dose."

If the vaccine also performs well in a clinical setting, the companies are on track to make it available in the first half of 2021. Medicago has said it has the manufacturing capacity to produce as many as 100 million doses in 2021.

The federal government is spending $173 million to help Medicago develop the vaccine and build a large plant in Quebec to produce it. Trudeau also announced a $18.2 million investment in Vancouver-based Precision NanoSystems, which offers technology to produce vaccines and therapeutic drugs.

Canada already has signed contracts for tens of millions more vaccine doses with other pharmaceutical giants, such as AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer. All told, the federal government has secured 358 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine — an insurance policy if some of the vaccines in development prove to be ineffective in clinical trials.

It's really all about obeying the message coming out of the US that it's right to hate China.

For those 'Canadians' who this concerns, aren't you proud of your hate for China?

You'd think so in theory but I'm just afraid Murphy might have written his Law for times just like these.

True but it would suck to see other economies taking off while we are still walking around with masks, half of our economy still shut down and seeing borders closed against us.

Living in an environment where you have to mask up sure as hell hurts the economy. Once other countries get well advanced int immunization they sure aren’t going to allow in foreigners from countries that aren’t nor are they going to travel to them. You may have been living almost normally last summer but our tourism and travel industries have been on their knees since last March. A vaccine is their only light at the end of this long tunnel.