Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine, which will one day be produced in Montreal, should know its fate “in the coming weeks”, following its review by Health Canada experts, which will have lasted nearly a year.
A senior Health Canada official spoke to a parliamentary committee about the upcoming end of the American company’s long process of approving the vaccine, a necessary step for its production in Quebec in a new plant financed by federal funds.
” [Le vaccin de Novavax] has been approved by the WHO [Organisation mondiale de la Santé], and Canada is working with other regulators to complete our study. We expect it to be completed in the coming weeks,” said Stephen Lucas, Deputy Minister of the Federal Department of Health.
He was responding to a question from New Democratic Party MP Don Davies at a meeting of the Standing Committee on Health in Ottawa on Tuesday.
Decision to come for three more vaccines
The WHO urgently approved the Novavax vaccine on December 17. Its protein-based technology, more traditional than messenger RNA vaccines, is similar to other vaccines that had already received the green light from the international organization.
Novavax filed its application for approval with Health Canada on January 29. During the winter, the Government of Canada signed an agreement with the company to produce this vaccine in Montreal, in a new factory located on the site of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Royalmount Street, at the cost of $126 million.
In addition to the Novavax vaccine, those from the companies Medicago and Sanofi are also under review by Health Canada. According to Deputy Minister Stephen Lucas, the department is working with these companies to obtain all the information required to complete their review.
The Government of Canada has signed agreements with a total of seven COVID-19 vaccine companies, but only four have received the green light from regulatory authorities so far: Pfizer-BioNTech (Comirnaty), Moderna (Spikevax), AstraZeneca (Vaxzevria or its Covishield version) and Johnson & Johnson (Janssen).
Federal Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Canada has 22 million doses of the vaccine in stock ready to serve as booster doses, along with 35 million more doses that will arrive “very soon”.