Happy Saturday!. I'm going to be mostly offline this weekend, but wanted to plug this column. I wanted to try and figure out if the federal government really has bungled our vaccines program in any way.

I found interesting things. Short thread. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/matt-gurney-what-happened-to-the-domestic-vaccine-production-we-were-promised

The problem with making heads or tails of the vaccine situation in Canada is that thus far it's two groups yelling at each other, and they both have a whole lot of self-interest in being right. But we can't actually know who's right yet. Too soon to say. +

Just by looking at publicly available information, Canada really doesn't seem that far out of step with the rest of the allies. I had a thread about this earlier in the week. + https://twitter.com/mattgurney/status/1331772339395178496

So, I mean, I dunno. Canada will receive imports of vaccines, and it's just impossible to say yet where we'll fall in terms of sequence. Countries that are manufacturing directly, obviously, will get priority access. The EU might also prioritize access among the members. +

So it's just too frickin' soon to say. If we get vaccines in a generally comparable timeframe to our allies, I think we're fine. Partisans gonna partisan but I don't think a delay of weeks kills the prime minister, for instance.

But a much longer delay? That totally could. +

In terms of producing our own domestically, this is where things get interesting.

Canada has vaccine production capability. But most of our capability is spoken for making essential but non-COVID vaccine. And the best COVID vax candidates use advanced tech that we don't use. +

The government has announced building, fast, a new production facility. It will be large-scale and use the advanced technology, so it WILL be able to produce the advanced vaccines in bulk, once we have a licencing agreement to produce whichever candidate we settle on. +

(There's been a lot of talk about why we don't have an agreement now, and from what I can tell, signing an agreement won't be hard, but we didn't bother before we had the capacity to make it. That'd be putting the cart before the horse.) +

The problem with this new facility, and this was clear as soon as it was announced, is that since we had to build it from scratch, it wasn't going to be ready until the summer of 2021. It's apparently still on track for that date. But that won't help us in Q1 and Q2 of 2021.+

A lot of people are angry, but, as I said in my column, amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. Building a new facility from scratch this takes time. Maybe we could have started a bit sooner or worked a bit faster. But seven MONTHS faster? I doubt it. +

Again, just bringing this back to politics, while PMJT might take hits if we are way behind everyone else, I don't think this is where he gets skewered. It takes time to spin up any major industrial effort. These things just don't operate on whatever schedule we find helpful. +

Thus far, while PMJT might get roasted if any of the above goes sideways on us — and it absolutely might — based on the information available to date, in terms of importing vaccine and building a new facility, I don't see any signs of major failure.

But! There is bad news.+

In April (and again in May) of last year, the federal government announced that it would invest $44 million in scaling up a small, existing facility in Montreal, that did have the right technology to produce the advanced vaccines. Not a LOT of vaccine, but SOME. +

The figures for how much vaccine this small existing facility can produce have varied widely by source, and the National Research Council told me that that's because there's a wide variation in requirements based on the specifics of a given vaccine. OK, fair enough. +

The range has been from 100,000 doses a month up to 250,000 doses a month. Assuming the vaccine selected would require a double-shot to be effective, that's 50,000 Canadians to 125,000 Canadians vaccinated per month. Let's split the difference and call it 75,000.+

(I know that's not a literal splitting of the difference, but I always round down. I'm a conservative. This is how I'm programmed.)

Anyway, 75,000 Canadians a month isn't a lot. There's 40 million of us. But we could do a lot of good by putting it into the right people. +

It wouldn't end the pandemic, but it could save a lot of lives, and make the tail-end of this terrible time a lot less heartbreaking.

The facility was supposed to be open ... now. November.

It's not. It's way behind schedule. +

The NRC told me that once they started the work, they realized there was a ton more work that needed doing. So instead of being ready now, it'll be ready, they hope, in the summer. Right around the time the big new facility is supposed to open up.

This ... isn't good. +

Let's assume the worst: the big facility runs way behind. We are way, way behind our allies in getting imports. Even small-scale domestic production starting now could have made a HUGE difference. But we don't have it.

And this WAS in the power of the Trudeau government. +

I don't know when, at the earliest, we could have gotten this facility operating. I don't know how much of the delay was unavoidable and how much can be fairly laid at the feet of PMJT. But I do now that Canada SUCKS at this kind of work, and he's done little to fix that. +

I also know further that it doesn't really matter, because politics is what it is and life ain't fair. This was something that was very much in the government's court, they announced the opening date months ago, reaffirmed it in August, and now, oops, they missed. +

Anyway, if we get shipments in line with the allies, it won't matter. If we get some shipments and the big facility opens in July, on schedule, it probably won't matter. If neither of those things happens, it probably ends up mattering a lot. This could really hurt the PM.

Anyway, please read my column and enjoy your Saturday. I'm going to go walk my dog before he completes his task of demolishing the entire house.

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