Thread by @JPTasker

New — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has announced plan to produce millions of COVID-19 shots at a plant in Montreal starting this summer, securing a domestic supply of vaccines as the global market contends with delivery delays and protectionist measures.

The National Research Council-owned Royalmount facility will churn out tens of millions of doses of the product developed by Maryland-based Novavax, Trudeau said. That company submitted its vaccine to Health Canada for regulatory approval last Friday.

"This is a major step forward to get vaccines made in Canada, for Canadians ... we need as much domestic capacity for vaccine production as possible," Trudeau said. "We won't rest until every Canadian who wants a vaccine has received one."

Novavax has said its protein-based COVID-19 vaccine product produced an efficacy rate of 89.3 per cent in late stage clinical trials, with strong protection against the UK strain of the virus that has shown to be more resistant to other vaccine candidates.

Canada agreed to purchase shots from Novavax, a biotech company that has been at the forefront of developing new vaccines against influenza, last August.

The gov't has since upped that purchase agreement with a commitment to buy at least 52 million doses of the two-dose product.

The prime minister earlier suggested that the NRC facility could be ready to produce shots by as early as this summer.

Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne has now clarified that the earliest possible production start date is likely "at the end of the year."

Trudeau said this morning, "My understanding is the production facility should be completed this summer. And once certification is made we should then be able to start producing the vaccines here in Canada reasonably quickly after that."

Champagne at the public health briefing, "Our estimate is that you could start production by the end of the year depending on the certification from Health Canada that everything is in order."

While this new production capacity will help the country combat possible future variants of COVID-19, or other infectious diseases, the agreements will do little to reduce the insatiable demand for vaccines in the present.

Canada passed on the domestic manufacturing rights to the AstraZeneca product. But other allies, like Australia and Japan, are set to produce that shot at their own facilities starting this spring.

Melbourne-based CSL will produce 2 million doses of the AstraZeneca each month starting in late March. JCR Pharmaceuticals will produce some 90 million doses this year for the Japanese market.