In this, the era of perpetual crises, Canada needs an institution to oversee the country’s health security.
That is one of the key messages in a new report titled “The Next One: Preparing Canada for another health emergency,” released Tuesday. It was prepared by the Life Sciences Forum, a blue-ribbon panel of industry, government, researchers and civil society representatives sponsored by the Public Policy Forum.
The proposed institution would bring together partners from government and industry and “be given a mandate to detect and respond to health emergencies, ensuring diagnostics, medicines, vaccines and other medical countermeasures are rapidly developed, manufactured and acquired through innovative procurement practices.”
This type of health security body already exists in a number of countries and the PPF panel suggests it could be modelled after the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. In other words, a “Canadian BARDA” would take an advisory role, acting as an early-warning system so governments are not caught flat-footed by health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic.
COVID-19 revealed glaring shortcomings in Canada’s emergency preparedness. The pandemic warning system, GPHIN (Global Public Health Intelligence Network), was shut down just before the virus hit.
Another symbol of the dysfunction: A stockpile of more than 50 million masks in Ontario was left to rot in a warehouse and not available when needed at the outset of the pandemic. The federal stockpile of personal protective equipment was not properly maintained either, and that left institutions like nursing homes without vital PPE.
But while there were failures, there were also successes during the pandemic.
For a time, there was unprecedented co-operation between governments and industry and, as a result, Canada did an incredible job getting vaccines into people’s arms.
Imagine if we could build that kind of trust and efficiency into an institution focused on health security.
After a pandemic that claimed at least 53,000 lives in this country, public health could use that kind of support.
One of the brutal lessons of the pandemic is that the global supply chain is as fragile as it is complex. The new report stresses the importance of innovative procurement mechanisms like pre-purchase agreements and long-term contracts. Countries like France and Great Britain invest in companies and, in return, get preferential access to products during emergencies. (Canada provides a lot of subsidies to businesses but rarely with strings attached.)
A small country like Canada – 2 per cent of the global market – also has to be innovative, and make itself “an indispensable player in the global life sciences ecosystem and supply chains” by playing to its strengths. Israel, for example, got the first crack at vaccines because it made itself a “pilot country” – a place with a smaller population, where a vaccination campaign could be put together quickly and pharmaceutical companies could learn from it as a test case.
The new report also stresses the importance of intelligence-gathering and the ability to collect and aggregate real-time data.
Canada was particularly bad at this during COVID. As the Auditor-General noted in a special report on the country’s response to the pandemic, provincial health data systems are not even interoperable.
The PPF report also underscores the importance of good risk communication during health emergencies. Again, during COVID, information from various agencies was inconsistent and often contradictory.
Health emergencies are something there will be no shortage of in the future. Our economic and personal security will be at risk more than we care to think. Once-in-a-century weather events are now annual. The next pathogen-driven pandemic is likely not far off either.
We got a taste of the new reality this summer. With the COVID-19 pandemic still lingering, Canada was slammed by wildfires and related atmospheric pollution, along with brutal heatwaves and devastating floods.
Climate change is not only spurring devastating weather events, but greatly increasing the likelihood of pandemics, from respiratory viruses to deadly fungi and more.
Seat-of-the-pants responses no longer cut it. We need a structure for predicting – and hopefully mitigating – coming health crises.
Twenty years ago, Dr. David Naylor, in his landmark report on SARS, called that pandemic a “reminder, a warning and an opportunity.”
Yet, there was virtually no action taken on his wise recommendations, leaving Canada in the lurch when COVID-19 hit brutally in the spring of 2020.
As the PPF panel notes, we can’t afford to repeat that failure.
We can, and should, use the brief interregnum to build up our capacity to guard against future threats and respond to coming health emergencies.
We’ve been warned many times that preparing for “The Next One” is essential. It’s about time we listened, and acted.