“Our government has promised to strengthen our capacity to produce vaccines” here in Canada, “Prime Minister Justin Trinto said in a statement at McGill University in Montreal. Canada has a notorious trajectory in recent decades of leading vaccine research, but is scrapping its domestic ability to produce real vaccines, leaving it dependent on vaccine facilities in other countries. The facility, which is expected to be operational in 2024, will employ 200 to 300 people and could produce up to 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine annually, Trinto said. But it will eventually be able to do research and hopefully produce other types of vaccines or treatment based on the same mRNA technology, or messenger RNA, that was first used in vaccines for COVID-19, he said. “It will also have a significant impact on research into a number of diseases. We talked about Alzheimer’s, we talked about cancer, we talked about the range of things that messenger RNA can do to keep Canadians and people around the world healthy. “, Said Trinto. “And Canada, which has long been a leader in mRNA research, will now also be a leader in mRNA delivery to Canadians and the world.” The founder and chairman of Moderna’s board has deep ties to Montreal, where his family fled after fleeing the Lebanese civil war. He attended Loyola College and McGill before attending MIT in Boston. Moderna, founded in 2010, is still based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The CEO of the company, Stéphane Bancel, participated in the announcement of Trudeau and the Quebec Premier, François Legault, saying that the course of Moderna over the last two years was dramatic, as it was struggling to develop and approve its mRNA vaccine for the first time. “People forget that Moderna lost money in 2020,” he said. “We did not have the financial straps to put this industrial machine into operation. And Canada was one of the few, a couple, countries that were here to help,” making one of the first orders for the vaccine and sending many – I needed cash, he said. Now that mRNA vaccines have been tested, approved and widely used – Moderna and Pfizer use technology – “for the first time in the history of medicine, we have an information molecule,” Bancel said. “And that changes everything. It’s like adding a blockbuster to Netflix. It’s a paradigm shift.” Moderna has also signed a partnership agreement with McGill, allowing it to leverage the university’s scientists while sharing proprietary information about the drug.
INSTALLATION IN KUBEK CEMENT AS AN INDUSTRIAL NOVEL: PREMIER
Quebec also has high hopes for the new facility, but in a slightly different way. Legault joked about how he and Ontario Prime Minister Doug Ford knew their provinces were both trying to host the new facility. “What a beautiful day,” Legault said with a laugh. “It gives me great pleasure to say that Quebec has won the battle,” he said. “It will not be in Ontario, it will be in Quebec, Doug, so a nice win.” In a more serious note, he said Quebec has already brought together many pharmaceutical and biotechnology 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 crystallization the position of the province as a node for the field. “With Moderna, we are adding an important player who will help structure our cluster,” he said. Provincial Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said it took “several months of effort” to convince Moderna to choose Quebec as the site for the new plant.
STRENGTHENING “HIGH PROFIT MARGINS”, INEQUALITY, say CRITICS
However, not everyone is celebrating the announcement. The nonprofit, the Council of Canada, says all Canadians should repel the government, which is pushing for high-profit, private vaccine production that has helped cut off access to vaccines for millions in less affluent countries. The facility may extend access to vaccines for Canadians in the future, but “our governments should not raise money from companies that consistently prioritize their own profits at the expense of global public health,” the Council of Canada wrote in a statement. . “Instead of opening the red carpet for private vaccine manufacturers, our leaders should do what they can to increase the state’s domestic production capacity,” said Christina Warner, co-executive director of the group. The answer to Canada’s vacant domestic capacity is not to invite big drug companies like Moderna, Warner said. “Private pharmaceutical companies like Moderna have denied millions of people around the world access to life-saving vaccines throughout the pandemic, boosting their own profits,” he said. The team noted that of the 670 million doses of vaccines it produced in 2021, Moderna delivered only two percent to low-income countries. Its sales to richer countries had “huge profit margins” and it also opposed a World Trade Organization proposal to give up copyright on COVID vaccines and refused to share its mRNA technology with other countries.
ANOTHER VAX FACTORY OPERATING IN MONTREAL
This facility will not be the only one in Montreal. Canada announced earlier in the pandemic that it would convert the Royalmount vaccine facility – already used for a similar science by the National Research Council – to allow it to mass-produce COVID-19 vaccines. It was not clear which vaccines the site would produce or if production had already begun. The National Research Council has not yet responded to a request for information. Canada has entered into two agreements with vaccine companies associated with this facility: Maryland-based Novavax and Vancouver-based Precision NanoSystems.
