How Canada’s CanSino COVID-19 vaccine deal with China collapsed – Maclean’s

 October 15, 2021 

Politics Insider for Oct. 15, 2021: The made-in-Canada vaccine breakdown; cabinet talk; and a CPC suspension

The Fifth Estate released an investigation Thursday that shed new light on the Trudeau government’s failed collaboration with a vaccine manufacturing company in China, CanSino, that led to a two-year delay in creating a made-in-Canada COVID-19 vaccine.

Government documents “show that Canadian officials wasted months waiting for a proposed vaccine to arrive from China for further testing and spent millions upgrading a production facility that never made a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.”

The reporting shows that Canada’s plan appears to have been stymied by Chinese political interference related to the Meng Wanzhou case.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the deal to Canadians on May 16, 2020. But a federal government memo later that same month reveals the Canadian Embassy in Beijing was still working to get the vaccine cleared by China’s customs. “CanSino vaccines are still with customs in China,” the memo said. “Embassy has a [meeting] tomorrow. Assuming they get through customs [tomorrow], they can be put on a flight on the 27th.” But the vaccine candidate was not put on a plane on May 27. That same day, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou — a high-profile tech executive in China — lost an appeal to the B.C. Supreme Court arguing against her arrest in Canada. Meng had been detained in Vancouver in 2018 on U.S. bank fraud charges.

Planning continued until August while the Trudeau government kept the difficulties secret. It has never explained what happened and did not help Fifth Estate with its report.

The Prime Minister’s Office did not answer when asked to explain the discrepancy between the promised production numbers and what happened. The prime minister and his ministers also declined interview requests about Canada’s early vaccine production plans, including with the NRC and CanSino. The NRC has said the U.S.-based vaccine developer Novavax will be its new partner for this facility, but Health Canada has not approved its vaccine yet.

The CanSino project was not the only partnership that the NRC was pursuing at the time, Justin Ling reported in Maclean’s earlier this year.

— Stephen Maher