Yongpeng Sun-Tastaufen
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Despite later playing down its significance, Ottawa rushed to reach a “very important” agreement with a Chinese company to produce a COVID vaccine, then tried for months to save the deal after China’s government blocked it, documents obtained by iPolitics show.
The deal was reached in April of 2020 between CanSino Biologics, a Chinese biopharmaceutical company, and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC), the Canadian government’s research agency.
CanSino had worked with China’s science ministry and a research arm of its military to develop the vaccine, which also used a cell line it had licensed from the NRC.
CanSino’s COVID vaccine was once the furthest advanced in the world, having started Phase 2 clinical trials in late April 2020, long before any other.
The Canadian government had arranged to run its own trials of the vaccine and to manufacture doses for Canadians, but never did.
CanSino has sold tens of millions of doses of its vaccine to other countries.
The documents are a mix of memos put together by the NRC and briefing notes it prepared for former Innovation, Science and Industry minister Navdeep Bains. They illustrate how China caught the Trudeau government off-guard, how the latter attempted to save the deal, and, eventually, how it tried to minimize its failure.
iPolitics requested the documents in December 2020 through Canada’s access-to-information system.
Although government institutions are supposed to respond to access-to-information requests within 30 days of receiving them, the NRC emailed the documents to iPolitics on Wednesday — eight months late.
Canada’s access-to-information system is infamously slow, but slowed down further during the pandemic, when many government employees were working from home.
The documents were also delivered nine days after the federal election, and four days after Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were freed from their three-year detention in China.
iPolitics asked current Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s office if instructions were given to the NRC’s access-to-information office not to release the documents until after the election and the two Michaels were freed.
“Unlike the previous Conservative government, we do not interfere in the Access to Information process,” Champagne’s office responded.
NRC’s media-relations department also said it wasn’t told to delay the documents’ release.
As permitted by the Access to Information Act, the NRC blacked out some information for reasons of national security and international relations, as well as legal reasons.
The briefing notes and memos were dated from May 1 to Sept. 1, 2020.
A May 1 briefing note sent to Bains shows that CanSino and the NRC agreed to a material-transfer agreement exactly one month earlier, which was three weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and Parliament came to a halt because of it.
The original plan was for the NRC to produce 70,000 to 100,000 doses of CanSino’s vaccine per month, which Maclean’s reported when it obtained some of the same documents iPolitics received.
Part of the NRC’s justification of the deal was its “strong collaborative history with CanSino,” because the company had used the NRC’s cell line before.
When CanSino and the NRC agreed to their COVID vaccine deal, the two Michaels had been imprisoned by the Chinese government for about a year and a half, and China had been restricting imports of Canadian canola. It had also been over seven months since two Chinese scientists were fired from their jobs at Canada’s National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg for reasons the government has fought to keep secret.
On May 8, the NRC told Bains it had formalized its contract with CanSino the day before.
Trials were supposed to take place at the Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. VIDO-Intervac, another vaccine-production facility that’s linked to the University of Saskatchewan, was part of the deal, too, and was going to design a production process for the vaccine.
READ MORE: Ottawa agreed to pay CanSino before their deal collapsed
Just before announcing the deal, the government revealed it was giving the NRC’s Montreal site, where CanSino’s vaccines were supposed to be made, a $44-million upgrade. On May 8, the NRC said it “anticipate(d)” the Montreal site would be production-ready by summer.
“The surest way to end the impact of COVID-19 on Canadian society is to develop an effective vaccine,” the May 8 briefing note says. “For this reason, the NRC partnership with CanSino is very important, and NRC is focused on advancing this promising vaccine as quickly as possible.”
The NRC announced the CanSino deal on May 12. Three days later, Health Canada approved the clinical trial.
“Vaccine materials are currently en route from China to Canada,” reads a May 19 NRC briefing note.
Documents later tabled in the House of Commons show that CanSino’s shipment to Canada that day was blocked by China’s customs agency because the Chinese cabinet hadn’t approved it.
READ MORE: Days after announcing deal, Ottawa learned China blocked CanSino’s vaccine shipment
The NRC told Bains three days later that, “assuming shipping challenges are overcome,” trials for the vaccine could start the week of June 1.
On June 5, the NRC told Bains that VIDO-Intervac’s role in the deal had grown in order to help the NRC “accelerate scale up production.”
The NRC — along with the Public Health Agency of Canada, Health Canada, and the federal health-care funding agency — was also planning how to distribute CanSino’s vaccine to Canadians.
On June 12, the NRC advised Bains that the shipment’s delay meant trials couldn’t start until late June or early July. This briefing note shows that the trial’s delayed start had caught the attention of news media.
“Media lines have been developed,” it says.
On June 26, the NRC told Bains that vaccine materials were expected “in early July.”
“Shipment of the vaccine material has stalled,” the NRC wrote to Bains on July 3. “CanSino remains very committed to the Canadian clinical trials.”
In one of the briefing notes obtained by iPolitics, the topics scheduled for a discussion between CanSino and the NRC on July 5 include: “status update, discussion on GMP (good manufacturing practice) readiness, upcoming decision points, next steps/timelines.” Everything in the slide deck besides the basic agenda was redacted.
iPolitics reported for the first time on July 6 that CanSino’s shipment hadn’t left China. It then reported on July 9 that Chinese customs had held it up.
READ MORE: Vaccine promised for human trials in Canada held up by Chinese customs
On July 10, Bains was told by the NRC that the agency “continues to work with CanSino … to gain Chinese approval for export of its vaccine material to Canada.”
An NRC document dated Aug. 3 provides answers to anticipated questions about its agreement with CanSino, including why Canada partnered with a Chinese firm while tensions between the countries were high, and how to explain the shipping delays.
Aug. 25 was the last time the NRC said in the documents that its deal with CanSino was alive, the same day the Globe and Mail reported it was officially dead.
“Due to the delay in the shipment of the CanSino COVID-19 vaccine candidate doses to Canada, and as CanSino has now Completed Phase I and Phase II clinical trials elsewhere, this specific opportunity is over,” reads a Sept. 1 NRC memo.
In the last Parliament, the opposition harshly criticized the Liberals for striking a deal that relied on China to obtain something as important as COVID vaccines.
The briefing notes and memos that show the unravelling of the agreement are in sharp contrast to how the Liberal government has characterized the events ever since. Trudeau has repeatedly minimized the deal.
Furthermore, he and a spokesperson for Champagne have both said the government’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force was responsible for the deal and its collapse, even though the task force wasn’t set up until months after the agreement was reached, and its secretary had told a parliamentary committee that the NRC’s deal was “independent” of its advice.
READ MORE: COVID Vaccine Task Force washes its hands of failed CanSino deal
iPolitics provided Champagne’s office with the documents it was given and asked: why the government has minimized the deal, despite the NRC calling it “very important”; why it believes China blocked the shipment of CanSino’s vaccine materials; and why it thought it could reverse China’s decision.
Champagne’s office didn’t directly answer the questions.
“In keeping with our commitment to science, our government listened to the advice of scientific experts at every step of this process,” Champagne’s office said in response.
“In the context of continued research and evolving evidence, the Vaccine Task Force revised its advice, and the NRC chose not to further pursue a vaccine partnership with CanSino. No money was ever paid under the agreement.”
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