In the February issue of The Walrus, Gwynne Dwyer makes the case that Canada may well be a vaccine superpower. He does this in the context of a review of the world’s ability to avert/prepare for/deal with a pandemic outbreak of avian flu:
“In 2001, the Canadian government contracted with ID Biomedical, currently based in Vancouver, to develop the infrastructure to supply all Canadians with vaccines solely from domestic production and last year it asked the firm to raise it production capacity to eight million does of vaccine a month. Even allowing for two to three months to identify the pandemic virus, create the vaccine, and test it before going into mass production, the whole Canadian population could be covered in as little as seven months. What the British are planning to do over the next several years, Canada has already done.
Barring the development of new techniques for rapid vacccine production, Canada would be one of the few hopes poor countries have of getting early access to an avian flu vaccine since no government could export vaccine until its own population was inoculated … Canada would be able to start sending vacccines abroad only seven or eight months after the pandemic hit. But how gets it? How do you decide? . . .
The article is not online so you’ll have to pick up a copy of the magazine to read the rest.