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Trudeau's last defense crumbles. The message has been that we couldn't make the vaccine here, and had to rely on other countries who had vaccine production facilities. Well, guess what? According to the Canadian doctor working at Oxford who has been on the development team for the Astrazeneka vaccine, Britain had virtually no production facilities either. That didn't stop them. TORONTO -- Countries like Canada that are waiting for vaccine shipments amid an international shortage could have done more in the early days of the pandemic to boost their own domestic production capacity, according to a leading vaccine expert from the United Kingdom. Oxford University Regius professor of medicine Sir John Bell was responsible for overseeing the development of the Astrazeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, which is approved in the U.K. but not yet in Canada. He said the U.K. went to great lengths to scale up its production in early 2020 as vaccine trials began. “We started from nothing, and we're now pretty pleased that we're in pretty good shape. Lots of other countries decided that they would rely on others, and that perhaps has not proved to be the right strategy,” Bell told CTV’s Question Period in an exclusive interview with Evan Solomon airing Sunday. The U.K. was able to increase its vaccine manufacturing capabilities from “very close to zero” in a matter of 10 months, Bell said. The strategy was to repurpose existing manufacturing facilities elsewhere in the country to suit vaccine production. "They repurposed those, they transferred the technology to them, they learned how to scale up, they went through all the hard yards it takes to become a manufacturing facility,” he said. Well how about that? They set about to produce vaccines and were ready with ten months. And what did our government do? It signed a deal with CHINA to produce vaccines for us. And when China laughed in our faces then they were left scrambling after other vaccine production companies to sign deals long after every other western country had already done so. Israel was just about the first to sign up and have no vaccinated half of every adult citizen. Canada is under 2%. The UK is up over 12% https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/as-canada-awaits-vaccine-doses-relying-on-other-countries-is-the-wrong-approach-u-k-expert-1.5288416

hardly unique to Lebanon. ANYWHERE you give bureaucrats authority greed will raise its ugly head and they will take advantage of the situation as they have the privilege to do so with no consequence.

That was just an excuse. It wouldn't have worked on another MP. They wanted him gone because he was a magnet for media attention and thus embarrassed the party. O'Toole is desperately trying to portray the Tories as just like the Liberals only slightly more fiscally responsible and slightly less woke.

. . . . because you said so? Clarify your all encompassing statement.

The stories are starting to proliferate in all the major media as Canadians see other countries moving forward faster towards the day of covid-free living, economies opening up, theaters and sports stadiums full of people, nightclubs and dancing. How Ottawa utterly botched Canada's COVID vaccine acquisition Despite spending more money on this pandemic than anyone else, Canada is lagging behind almost every other developed nation in vaccination numbers It’s now becoming increasingly clear that as the world mobilizes to immunize itself against COVID-19, Canada is falling seriously behind. At a time when more than half of Israelis have gotten the jab, Canada has only two per cent of its population vaccinated. Recent analysis by The Economist found that while virtually all of Europe will be fully vaccinated by the end of this year, the earliest Canada can hope for is mid-2022. And in one of the sharpest rebukes to Canada’s pandemic performance yet, the federal government has tapped into a global vaccine-sharing pool initially meant for developing nations. The coming months will reveal much of the failures and oversights that allowed this to happen, but below is a primer on why you’re going to be vaccinated much later than if you were an American, Brit or even Serbian. https://nationalpost.com/news/how-ottawa-utterly-botched-canadas-covid-vaccine-acquisition

There were no fences there prior to Jan 6. Who made that necessary?

We shouldn't trust Health Canada or the Canadian federal government anymore on vaccination. All vaccines approved by Britain's NHS, including Astro-Zeneca should be approved immediately and the Canadian government must ask for blueprints for construction of a vaccination facility that is already producing vaccines, immediately approve the construction and production, and copy the blueprints. We can't afford more delays, excuses, and lack of transparency on contracts. https://apple.news/A3HvgHtfSRmOCR0CFhUNvHg

Still, if Covid hasn't convinced us we need our own capability to manufacture vaccines, nothing ever will.

More on the incompetent Trudeau government's vaccine failure from the Globe. The Trudeau government has a plan for Canadian-made vaccines – in 2022 It has a familiar ring to it, doesn’t it? Had Ottawa implemented its latest border controls last year, there is a good chance that, combined with provincial public-health measures, they would have reduced the spread of COVID-19 in Canada. Early border measures would also have greatly reduced the importation of several more contagious variants of the COVID-19 virus first discovered in Britain, Brazil and South Africa, which have now been imported here. But Ottawa didn’t act to bring in effective travel restrictions until last month. It’s as if the Trudeau government can’t grapple with the problem in front of it, until it’s too late. Tuesday’s vaccine announcement is the same. It comes so late in the game – it is essentially a plan to deliver vaccines after the game is supposed to be over – that it will have more of an impact on the next pandemic, should one ever occur, than on the current one. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-trudeau-government-has-a-plan-for-canadian-made-vaccines-in-2022/ Passed-over Canadian biomanufacturing company says it can still produce COVID-19 vaccine The president of a Canadian biomanufacturing company is offering to manufacture a COVID-19 vaccine just as soon as he and his team are asked, but the federal government says it has already picked the best candidates. “We’re very willing and happy to help Canada make anything,” Donald Gerson, president of Montreal-based PnuVax Inc., told CTV’s Power Play on Tuesday. “We’ve got a good-sized factory here. It’s got lots of capabilities. We’d be very, very pleased to help and make as much as we possibly could for Canada’s benefit.” On Tuesday, The Globe and Mail reported that PnuVax has not received any federal investment to produce a COVID-19 vaccine or therapy, despite its experience and sizable facilities. Instead, the government chose a public lab that has pushed back its timeline for being ready to manufacture the first doses of a vaccine from November, 2020, to some time after mid-2021. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-president-of-montreal-company-pnuvax-says-ottawa-passed-on-its-offer/

Another demonstration of how the federal Liberals blew the covid response. 'We're no longer two months behind Moderna, we're one year behind. If we had $1 billion we would have finished at the same time as Moderna. But we never asked for $1 billion. We asked for $35 million. Had we gotten that, we wouldn't be starting Phase 1 right now, we would be in Phase 3' — Brad Sorenson, CEO of Providence Therapeutics https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/corbella-covaccine-solution-was-right-here-in-calgary-while-trudeau-looked-to-china?fbclid=IwAR2xyJ8_ZeI6qnYgCV7OoH8Byl41t0akYIAvxQc_rFlnOLXi4B_aDZcIU-g

The Alberta Government just announced that they are going to loosen restriction on COVID, commencing February 8. My main fear, is this is too early to do so as the risk of a third lockdown is too great. Personally, I would have waited two weeks, and eased restrictions on February 23. By mid February, temperatures start rising, and by late March, people start going outdoors to parks and outdoor recreation events.