Last week Rat Bastard 2.0 announced that a made-in-Canada vaccine for the Wuhan Flu was coming to the rescue...starting in Christmas of 2021.
The problem is that Trudeau’s plan doesn’t call for retooling an existing facility, the whole plan is to keep moving forward with a new plant for the National Research Council in Montreal.
Construction is months behind schedule and the building won’t be completed until the summer. When asked when vaccines would actually be ready, Trudeau was vague and told reporters they should ask the ministers in charge at the next news conference.
So they did.
“At the end of the year we will be in a position to be producing vaccine,” Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said.
Notice of course that the facility is in Rat Bastard 1.0's old riding of Mont-Royal, that it's next to an existing facility that was just renovated (incorrectly, at our expense) last year for his silly China vaccine, that there are construction delays, and that SNC Lavalin is of course involved.
Now there are vaccine manufacturers in Canada, but none that produce the mRNA type that apparently are going to save us all from the Kung Flu (hint: they won't). In 2019 a Saskatchewan facility scheduled to open in 2020 was funded by all levels of government...and now it's going to be finished at the end of 2021, but also making the protein-based vaccines that we just finished being told didn't work.
That link above from Research Money newsmagazine talked about the importance of developing small scale vaccine technology in Canada, possibly as a result of global anti-free-trade pressures from candidates as diverse as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. This was probably why we weren't in the business of it before...
Naturally, as Lilley's article continues, the Shiny Pony blames his predecessor:
As he made his announcement about this vaccine that might be ready to go by the end of this year, Trudeau not only bragged about what his government has done but tried to imply that it was the Harper government’s fault that Canada wasn’t already producing its own vaccines.
A regular claim from the Trudeau Liberals is that Canada doesn’t have any domestic vaccine capacity.
“That’s just not true,” Paul Lucas told me over the phone just after Trudeau made his comments.
Lucas was the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline in Canada from 1995 through to 2012. He oversaw the GSK’s production of Canada’s H1N1 vaccine in 2009 and was there when the company signed a 10-year contract to supply flu pandemic vaccines for the federal government in 2011.
Lucas said that while it wouldn’t be simple to change an existing vaccine plant over to a COVID vaccine plant, it can be done and would be faster than building a new facility.
The observant may note, of course that the Right Honourable Stephen Harper (pbuh) was the Prime Minister in 2011. Shiny Pony has only been in the role since 2015.
So problems with vaccines in 2021 is the fault of the guy from six years ago. By that logic, shouldn't Biden's entire first term be him thanking Donald Trump for his vaccine successes?
