Despite the murky uncertainty surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s the responsibility of every nation to contribute what they can to the attempts at combating it. China may very well have had a hand early on in the creation or expedited transmission of the virus due to the Wuhan area and its seafood market. However, that isn’t stopping them from being near the forefront of vaccine research, an undertaking that Canada is working right there with them on.
The federal government is still in talks with China over moving forward with clinical trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters on Thursday, despite a delay in shipping the drug to Canada. Trials for Ad5-nCoV, developed by biopharmaceutical company CanSino Biologics along with Chinese government scientists, was supposed to be underway after Health Canada approved it for human testing in May, but progress came to a standstill after Canadian authorities said the Chinese government had yet to sign-off on shipping the drug to Canada.
Largely praised so far in his handling of the country during the pandemic, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stated that we're obviously continuing to work with the Chinese government to ensure that this work can continue in an uninterrupted fashion, as he spoke to reporters at a press conference on Thursday. "This particular approach is one that has worked well in the past. This partnership actually created significant measures against Ebola a number of years ago. And as we're looking at developing a vaccine, we're investing in many different approaches to try and figure out where that vaccine will come from.” Human trials of the Ad5-nCoV vaccine candidate are already underway in China, with results promising enough that the Chinese government has approved it for use in its military. Normally, testing can take five to seven years, but the anticipated Canadian clinical trials, which would be carried out by the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (CCV) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, was expected to move along much faster due to the urgency of the pandemic.
As all nations race towards finding a cure soon, it won’t be until of them does that things can resume back to normal. Businesses, schools and just about every aspect of life hangs in a state of limbo, waiting for word that the cure has been found. Until that is the reality however, it’s at least a reassuring sight to see all the best scientific minds of the world, regardless of country of origin or agenda, coming together to work on a cure for the betterment of mankind.
