procurement

Friday May 7, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday May 7, 2021

The Political Blame Game

February 6, 2021

For months now, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has blamed everyone for Canada’s trickle of COVID-19 vaccines but himself.

Trudeau and his ministers have gone so far as to blame former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney — who was prime minister from 1984 to 1993 — for the privatization, or “the selling off“, of Connaught Laboratories. What he fails to mention is that Connaught Labs didn’t go anywhere. It’s now part of Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines. The Connaught Campus in Toronto accounts for one-fifth of the company’s global vaccine sales.

Experts in Canada’s innovative pharmaceutical industry — as opposed to the generic pharmaceutical industry — say Trudeau’s attempt to pin the blame on Mulroney or a more recent Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is ironic, because were it not for Mulroney, the innovative industry likely wouldn’t exist here at all.

March 9, 2016

Paul Lucas, who was president and CEO of GlaxoSmithKline Canada from 1994 to 2012, started speaking out and wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Post after he heard federal Liberal Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc being interviewed on CTV’s Power Play with Evan Solomon, saying that GlaxoSmithKline had closed its manufacturing facility for vaccines during Harper’s Conservative government, which is false.

“This facility didn’t close, it’s still producing most of the flu vaccine for Canada on an annual basis,” Lucas said during a recent telephone interview.

“I’ve been very concerned and frankly upset about the lies that are coming from the federal government about this whole (COVID vaccine) file,” says Lucas, who was integral to the production and distribution of the Canadian vaccine for the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. All of the vaccine for that outbreak was produced in the GSK factory in Quebec City.

“Trudeau has badly botched Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine procurement,” states Lucas.

“First, he blamed Harper for his own failings. Then he blamed Mulroney and then he blamed the provinces. Then he actually turned on his own vaccine task force. He blamed them for about a day or two. Then he blamed the companies — Pfizer for delaying the delivery of its vaccines in January,” explains Lucas. (Calgary Herald) 

November 19, 2020

Meanwhile, Ontario Minister of Long-term Care Merrilee Fullerton faced a call from the Opposition to resign her cabinet post on Tuesday, in the wake of two reports that reviewed her ministry’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In recent days, Fullerton has been pressed to explicitly acknowledge whether she feels she shares any responsibility for the more than 3,700 deaths of long-term care residents with COVID-19 in Ontario.

During question period Tuesday, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath asked when Fullerton was made aware that some residents had died of dehydration or basic neglect, which led a tense exchange between the two.

“The premise of your question is bordering on obscene,” Fullerton said. “And the reason why is because all of the ministry, public health, medical officers of health, thousands of people have been working to shore up these homes and they were no match for COVID-19.”

Fullerton said that some long-term care homes became “warzones” within days of the first confirmed cases among residents and staff. 

“What we were doing 24 hours a day was trying to get support to those homes, with an unknown virus that wasn’t fully understood and a shortage of supplies globally,” she added.

May 4, 2021

Fullerton then said the NDP had failed to pressure the previous Liberal government into fixing Ontario’s beleaguered long-term care sector.

“Look at your failure. I was left to pick up the pieces from a devastating 15 years of neglect,” she said. “I will not be spoken to that way by the leader of the opposition that neglected this sector.” 

Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk and the Ontario Long-term Care COVID-19 Commission both released their respective reports last week. While the probes examined different aspects of COVID-19’s impact on the long-term care sector, they reached similar conclusions: the ministry was not prepared for a pandemic, in part due to years of inaction to prevent a crisis. (CBC) 

 

Friday April 9, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday April 9, 2021

Canada’s public health data meltdown

For weeks, Canadians have been casting their envious eyes to Israel, where more than half the country has been inoculated against COVID-19. Israel, less than a quarter the size of Canada, has administered nearly twice as many doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

December 11, 2020

The Middle Eastern country has some innate advantages: It is small and centralized, and offered top dollar to ensure vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna would come fast, and in large volumes. But geography and money aren’t the reason why Israel is outpacing Canada by 10-to-one.

Israel has the vaccines because it has the data.

In its shrewd deal with Pfizer, Israel offered to turn the country into one giant clinical trial: Providing the vaccine manufacturer unprecedented large-scale visibility as to the vaccine’s efficacy. It’s all made possible because of the country’s state-of-the-art information technology and robust national vaccination database.

The rest of the world is currently benefiting from that incredibly granular information.

December 21, 2016

Canada could never have struck such a deal. Its health technology is, charitably, a decade out of date. It lacks the ability to adequately track infectious disease outbreaks, efficiently manage vaccine supply chains and storage, quickly administer doses, and monitor immunity and adverse reactions on a national basis.

Even though all the shipments of vaccines arriving in Canada come with scannable barcodes, to make tracking and logistics easier—with some manufacturers even barcoding the vials themselves—no Canadian province can scan them. In many provinces, pharmacies can’t access the provincial vaccine registry. Provinces do not automatically submit reports on COVID-19 cases or vaccines into the federal system, and must submit reports manually. Many crucial reports are still submitted by fax: Where fax has recently been phased out, they have been replaced by emailed PDFs.

March 31, 2021

Ours is a dumb system of pen-and-paper and Excel spreadsheets, in a world quickly heading towards smart systems of big data analytics, machine learning and blockchain. It’s unclear how Ottawa will be able to issue vaccine passports, even if it wants to.

At the core of the omnishambles is a simple fact that Canada has no national public health information system, but 13 different regional ones. Many of those regional systems have smaller, disconnected, systems within: Like a Russian nesting doll of antiquated technology.

But there’s good news: It doesn’t have to be this way. In some parts of the country, real progress is being made. Small technology start-ups are figuring out cheap, scalable and innovative solutions. In some provinces, progress can be as simple as updating operating systems.

If we are ever going to build efficient, cost-effective, and effective health infrastructure, Ottawa needs to take the lead. We need to abandon the idea that federalism requires us to have each sub-national government run entirely independent, walled-off, health databases.

We need data sharing. We need shared infrastructure. We need a national public health system. (Continued: MacLean’s) 

 

Friday March 5, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Friday March 5, 2021

Pandemic Partisan Pile-ons

March 2, 2021

Only three months ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and said that, when it came to vaccinations for COVID-19, Canada was in a superior position compared with its global peers. 

The government’s planning, he said, “resulted in us having the best portfolio of vaccines of any country in the world, with more doses per capita than any other country.”

But as of this week, Canada ranked behind more than 30 countries 

in vaccination rates. Its number of inoculated citizens stalled in February, hovering at about 5 per cent – while peer countries such as Britain and the United States, as well as poorer countries such as Chile and Morocco, have accelerated their rollout.

The government has assured Canadians the faltering start is now in the rearview mirror and a rapid increase in vaccine deliveries will see the country closing the gap.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trudeau said he was optimistic that Canada will be able to surpass his stated September deadline for getting shots to everyone. That end-of-summer deadline is in line with one set by Germany but behind Britain and the U.S.

How did the government go from proclaiming its performance was “the best” to fending off accusations that it had failed its citizens?

January 28, 2021

A Globe and Mail analysis has shown the Trudeau government’s lofty promises were never consistent with several hard realities: a severe lack of manufacturing capacity in a world obliged to vaccinate their own citizens first, as well as contracts with vaccine suppliers that appear to contain less-advantageous delivery schedules than those inked by Britain and the U.S.

What’s more, rather than prepare Canadians for an inevitable lag at the start of the vaccination schedule, the government relied on soaring rhetoric. It told Canadians it had hedged its bets and assured success by signing contracts with multiple international pharmaceutical giants. And although it’s certainly true that Ottawa placed wise bets on the vaccines first out of the clinical-trial gate – those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca – it didn’t properly explain to citizens that the global inoculation race had two distinct phases: first to purchase the vaccines and then to secure them.

“Canada, for some reason, was very quick to make purchases and really slow to invest in the manufacturing piece. I don’t know what went into those decisions,” said Andrea Taylor, a researcher with Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Centre, which has been tracking vaccine procurements around the world.

“They may have had more faith in the global supply chain than other countries.” (Globe & Mail) 

February 25, 2021

Meanwhile, Shipments are ramping up, more COVID-19 vaccines are getting approved, and expert advice to stretch the gap between doses means millions of Canadians could get the protection of a first dose sooner than expected. 

Taken together, those changes represent a significant shift from the delays and consternation that marked Canada’s national vaccine campaign in recent weeks.

But they have also left Ontario scrambling to keep up with the pace. 

Facing criticism over failing to prepare for the long-foreseen surge of doses that Ottawa ordered from overseas, Premier Doug Ford’s government is now set to table an updated vaccination schedule on Friday. 

The plan comes after a week that saw existing timelines — which were widely criticized as too vague and too slow — suddenly in flux. (Toronto Star)