In a speech Wednesday at the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, Champagne said he hopes a COVID-19 vaccine can be produced at home in the "medium term" as a federal investment strategy begins to bear fruit.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last month that Canada has a new contract with Maryland-based Novavax to eventually churn out doses of its vaccine at a new National Research Council facility going up in Montreal. But construction won't wrap up until the summer and production will likely begin in late fall at the earliest, long after Canada expects to import enough doses to vaccinate the entire population.
Within a month of the World Health Organization's declaring COVID-19 a pandemic, Ottawa made $792 million available through its Strategic Innovation Fund to fuel clinical trials and manufacturing of vaccines and therapeutic drugs to fight the virus. Canada is buying at least 238 million doses of seven different vaccines, but only one is from a Canadian company -- Medicago -- and, at least at first, none will be produced in Canada.
Blah blah blah blah
Eventually? Eventually isn't a target. 10 or 100 years from now?