Canada’s chief public health officer says she won’t cut corners to get a vaccine candidate for COVID-19 approved.
Dr. Theresa Tam made the comment at a media briefing in Ottawa on Tuesday following an announcment earlier in the day by Russia that it had become the first country in the world to grant regulatory approval to a coronavirus vaccine, after less than two months of human testing.
Sidestepping a question about the Russian vaccine, Tam said Canada uses ‘solid’ processes to ensure the quality and safety of its vaccines, adding that she has full confidence in Health Canada’s process to approve a vaccine.
Tam, who said last week the virus had taught Canadians “some hard lessons” and that there was no “silver bullet” that would bring a swift end to the pandemic, said she is “cautiously optimistic” that will happen soon but said safety will not be compromised to get there.
“Getting this done in record time is no easy feat, as we must ensure any vaccine demonstrates the highest standard of safety and effectiveness,” she said.
Her deputy, Dr. Howard Njoo, said there is little information available about how effective the Russian vaccine has been, as well as any side effects it had for the people it was tested on and how many people were involved in the trials.
The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), which was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China–miniscule in size but enormous in so many other ways.(Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM/CDC/)
One of the only indicators, he said, is the amount of time that passed between the discovery of the vaccine and the decision to approve it.
“It seems quite short, based on what we know about how normally vaccine trials go,” Njoo said.
Vaccine development normally takes years, if not decades. But scientific teams around the world are aiming to develop a COVID-19 vaccine in 12 to 18 months.
Pfizer will supply its BNT162 mRNA-based vaccine candidate, while Moderna will provide its mRNA-1273 vaccine candidate.
The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Canada surpassed the 120,000 mark Tuesday, with 8,987 deaths attributed to the disease.
Tam said almost nine in 10 patients have already recovered.
With files from CBC News, RCI, The Canadian Press
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