Ottawa has purchased half a million doses of a bird flu vaccine that could be offered to agricultural workers and others at higher risk of catching a virus that has decimated Canadian poultry farms and nearly took the life of a B.C. teen.
The Public Health Agency of Canada announced Wednesday that it has tapped an existing agreement with the pharmaceutical company GSK to secure 500,000 doses of a vaccine designed to protect against a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 avian influenza.
The shots were made at GSK’s vaccine plant in Sainte-Foy, Que. Most of them – 60 per cent of the supply – will be distributed in the coming weeks to provinces and territories to deploy at their discretion, while the rest will remain in a federal stockpile.
“I am really glad to hear of this move,” said Sarah Otto, a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia and co-leader of a group of researchers who track the evolution of viruses, including H5N1 and the virus that causes COVID.
“It feels like H5N1 is playing Russian roulette with us right now. It’s not spreading from person to person, and that’s great, but with the flu season and how much this virus recombines, the risk is that it acquires mutations or acquires segments that allow it to transmit among humans. If that happens, we don’t know how deadly it will be.”
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Dr. Otto and some other experts had been urging Canada to purchase and stockpile a limited supply of bird flu vaccines as the United States and many European countries have already done or announced plans to do.
The urgency of their calls only grew after a 13-year-old girl from British Columbia’s Fraser Valley was diagnosed with Canada’s first domestically acquired case of avian flu in November. She was discharged from BC Children’s Hospital in early January after weeks spent fighting for her life in critical care. Public-health officials in B.C. say they still don’t know how the teen caught the virus.
Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, said in an interview that Wednesday’s announcement was the culmination of months of behind-the-scenes work to secure the doses. Health Canada had previously approved a vaccine against H5N1, but the regulator had to issue a fresh authorization for a version that includes an updated strain targeting a clade known as 2.3.4.4b.
She said the bird flu vaccines, which were developed with the same egg-based technology used in seasonal influenza vaccines, would expire in February, 2026.
When reached by The Globe and Mail, Public Services and Procurement Canada was unable to provide the cost of the bird flu vaccines before deadline Wednesday.
Also on Wednesday, the National Advisory Committee on Immunization issued preliminary guidance on how bird flu vaccines should be used outside the context of the pandemic.
The panel of Canadian vaccine experts laid out several different use cases for the shots, but their advice focused on protecting people at highest risk, such as lab staff who handle live H5N1 virus and workers who destroy birds on farms suffering outbreaks.
Nearly 14.5 million wild and farmed birds have died or been culled in Canada since the highly pathogenic version of bird flu was first identified in Newfoundland in late 2021, according to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
The virus has since spread across North and South America and to many kinds of mammals, most notably dairy cows in the U.S. The virus has been discovered in 972 herds in 17 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been 68 cases in humans in the U.S., including one fatal case in a senior citizen in Louisiana who had been in contact with sick and dead birds in a backyard flock.
Dr. Tam emphasized Wednesday that bird flu currently poses little risk to most Canadians. “There is no evidence of any efficient human-to-human transmission at this point, but that would be the trigger” to raise the threat level, she said.
Matthew Miller, director of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research at McMaster University, called purchasing bird flu vaccines a “prudent decision.”
“My view on this in the wake of COVID-19 is that prevention at the stage we’re at right now is way more straightforward than trying to respond once we get human-to-human transmission,” he said, “because right now, we mostly know where the risk is.”