Montreal City Weblog

Kate 08:14 on 2021-06-22 Permalink Reply  

• Meezly 08:48 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  From the CTV article: “The hope is that the lab will be useful to thwart off future variants of the coronavirus, produce potential booster shots and be an active contributor to combat future health emergencies or pandemics.”

  Later in the article: “Experts say the Montreal laboratory will not have the ability to produce mRNA vaccines, like Pfizer and Moderna, but it will be able to produce other types of vaccines — up to two million doses a month.”

  Aren’t mRNAs proven to be more effective against the variants? If a lab can’t produce mRNAs than what is the point of setting up the lab in the first place?

• jeather 09:54 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  Covid aside, mRNA vaccines are clearly the technology of the future, though I don’t know enough of the timing of this lab to know exactly how stupid this plan is

• Joey 11:19 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  Vaccine self-sufficiency will never happen. There’s a global market for doses (mRNA espcially) and the bottlenecks happen because the raw ingredients are scarce. Trudeau’s gambit – sign a bunch of contracts with anyone who could potentially provide doses – seems to have paid off. We weren’t first out of the gate at getting mass numbers of doses in arms, but would you trade places with any other country on June 22, 2021? According to https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations, we lead the world in % of population having received a first dose.

• mare 13:04 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  mRNA vaccine production/manufacturing is very much patented and Pfizer nor Moderna will license their methods. It’s a multi billion dollar industry now, and much more in the future. They’re already doing Phase 2 trials with mRNA based drugs against cancer, and a vaccine against HIV is also in a test phase.

• Raymond Lutz 14:22 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  TL;DR it but C. Doctorow wrote “Manufacturing mRNA vaccines is surprisingly straightforward (despite what Bill Gates thinks),”

• thomas 17:28 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  I am sceptical that it is so easy to manufacture mRNA vaccines. Moderna received $1B from the US gov to ramp up production and there have been significant delays in shipment. BioNTech didn’t even attempt to scale production and instead licensed their technology to Pfizer.

• JaneyB 18:09 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  @Joey – I’m loving that website. My, what a lovely arc we have. I am pleasantly surprised. I was certain that it would be 2022 before most Canadians got their first dose and I’m delighted to be totally wrong.

  AFAIK, a Canadian company in BC provided the lipid for the Pfizer vaccine, I believe. Its small production capacity was part of the delay in world production. All this stuff needs to be fixed.

• Raymond Lutz 19:56 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  Thomas, I dug some links farther. Cory Doctorow: “The authors – a mix of public health, chemical engineering and vaccine specialists from Imperial College and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative – describe the results of their modeling of new mRNA vaccine factories, based on the experience of ramping up covid vaccine facilities. They base their findings – contrasting mRNA vaccine production with conventional vaccine production – on an open-access Superpro Designer model (available at Github).”

  From the orginal article (it’s open acces, maybe chemical engineers and microbiologists here on MtlCityWeblog could check it out):

  “Emerging rapid-response vaccine platform technologies, especially RNA platforms, offer a high productivity estimated at over 1 billion doses per year with a small manufacturing footprint and low capital cost facilities. The self-amplifying RNA (saRNA) drug product cost is estimated at below 1 USD/dose. “

• mare 22:49 on 2021-06-22 Permalink

  Maybe the WHO should find another way to make mRNA vaccines. There are two patented methods now, there must be many others.

  They have done it before.

  After the Second World War the WHO in Rome commissioned British scientists to find another method to mass-manufacture penicillin. The only method that was available was patented, making penicillin extremely expensive and only available to rich people. They found another way, circumventing the patent, and penicillin (and later other antibiotics) became cheap to manufacture and available all over the world.

  (One of those scientists was my late grandmother-in-law. A bit beyond the scope of this blog, but she *did* live in Montreal for many years, when her husband was Dean of McDonald college.

  So here’s some anecdote, from her self published autobiography:

  “I have decided to add this note on some work I did in Rome as it may be of interest in a historical sort of way.

  The antibiotic penicillin was discovered in Britain, as we all know. For a long time it was considered to be of only scientific interest, but just before the outbreak of war in 1939 it was being produced in experimental quantities by Drs Howard Florey and Ernst Chain and others, who later won the Nobel Prize for their efforts. Since the antibiotic is a by-product of growth by various species of the fungus Penicillium they found that the best way to collect it was to seed the fungal spores over a large pan filled with a shallow layer of liquid culture medium from which they isolated the antibiotic after several days’ growth. They used bedpans, the only vessels available large enough to produce a sufficient volume, and found in those days that the sterilization and protection from contamination of such large containers was a difficult and cumbersome procedure.

  On the outbreak of war it was felt that this new medical resource might save many lives if it could be made available in sufficient quantity, which was not possible in England with the present laborious procedures and the disruptions of war. So it was decided to send spores of this fungus to a drug company (I do not remember which) in the US in the hope that they could develop a method of mass production. They did, and since Florey and Chain had not thought to patent the right to produce the antibiotic, this was taken up by the drug company, which meant that none of the procedures that they had developed were published, and the drug company profited from the enormous sales and expensive price of the penicillin that they produced.

  After the war the World Health Organisation considered that it would be advantageous for world health if the antibiotic could be produced more cheaply in disadvantaged parts of the world. Since Italy at that time did not subscribe to the international patents agreements, the W.H.O set up a lab in the lnstituto Superiore di Sanita in Rome headed by Dr. Ernst Chain to develop a system of culturing the fungus in large tanks which was known to be the method used by the American drug company.

  He collected a team of Italian scientists to do the work and since I just happened to have arrived in Rome at that time, and had experience with submerged culture conditions for producing fungal enzymes, I was added to the team. After mastering the procedures we trained a team from India to produce penicillin in their new factory. As soon as our results were published the price of the antibiotic tumbled; a good result in one way but a disaster in another as every sick person, whether it was appropriate or not, insisted on being treated with the new miracle drug, thus leading to the early development of penicillin-resistant bacteria.”)

• Ephraim 07:11 on 2021-06-23 Permalink

  @mare – Moderna and Biontech. Pfizer doesn’t have the technology at the moment… they are trying to develop it on their own and walked away from Biontech to do it.

  The mRNA vaccines may lead to finally eradicating some of the worst we have out there. They are close to a malaria vaccine and finally (Moderna) is close to a vaccine for HIV.

  Now, if we can only get Afghanistan and Pakistan to take their polio vaccinations and that disease will be fully eradicated.

• Kate 10:38 on 2021-06-23 Permalink

  Ephraim, with the Taliban resurging in Afghanistan, polio will have a foothold there for awhile.

  Speaking of eradicating diseases, when I looked in the bathroom mirror to remove the little round bandaid from my second Pfizer jab, I was pleased to see it was right beside the scar from my childhood smallpox vaccination. There’s an immunity that will never have to be challenged!

• Raymond Lutz 11:35 on 2021-06-23 Permalink

  Taliban, a nuisance to mass vaccination? What about the US? How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All (SciAm)

• Kate 09:03 on 2021-06-24 Permalink

  mare, that story reminds me of “The Third Man”.