Canada’s Liberals to Launch Pandemic Preparedness Agency

To strengthen Canada’s capacity to combat infectious diseases and guard against future pandemics, the federal Liberals are establishing a new agency. According to Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, the agency’s goal is to maintain the “top-gun team” of public employees that assisted in guiding Canadians through COVID-19.

Emergency Preparedness for Health Canada’s mission is to accelerate the transition from research to commercialization to strengthen the country’s life sciences industry and guarantee that Canadians have quicker access to vaccinations, medical treatments, and diagnostics.

“The danger would have been (that) if we don’t have a permanent agency sitting somewhere, that collective knowledge that we have accumulated during COVID would even be dispersed eventually, perhaps even lost within the civil service,” Champagne told the press on Tuesday.

“We’re pulling them together in a team so that when people are talking about health, emergency readiness, they know where to knock,” Champagne said.

The Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada personnel will be part of the new organisation, which will have its headquarters in the Industry Department.

According to Champagne, it is based on spending that Parliament has already approved through this year’s budget and doesn’t require any new legislation. He said, “We want to maintain a very close nexus with industry.”

The organisation will coordinate activities with foreign partners, Canadian industry, and university researchers.

This comes after the European Union made a similar decision in 2021 to establish an organisation that aims to both learn from the COVID-19 pandemic’s mistakes and try to prepare the continent for pandemics.

Due to its antiquated and inadequately stocked emergency stockpile and nearly nonexistent vaccine production industry, Canada was ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The British Medical Journal criticised Canada’s “major pandemic failures” in the previous year, citing issues with jurisdiction and a high death rate in long-term care facilities.

However, the NDP and medical experts have urged the Trudeau government to conduct an investigation of how governments handled the COVID-19 epidemic and how they may better handle a future pandemic, following the lead of the United Kingdom.

Champagne responded that the announcement is centred on having the appropriate resources and researchers available as needed when questioned about an inquiry.

All of us hope that there won’t be any further pandemics. However, it is your duty to ensure that the team is prepared and on standby,” he stated.

When peers began looking at future event preparation, Champagne informed a biotechnology sector meeting on Friday that officials discovered Canada was not prepared in terms of coordinating “health emergency readiness.”

“We realised that things were scattered,” he stated.

He warned that Canada ran the risk of becoming the only G7 nation “without a dedicated team” in the event of a pandemic.

Upon complete functioning, the agency will possess a “industrial game plan” that will enable swift research and industrial mobilisation in the event of the declaration of another health emergency, such as a pandemic.

According to Champagne, the public’s enthusiasm for the biotechnology industry has increased as a result of the epidemic and investments in personalised medicine.

“If there is one industry that I think Canadians have fallen in love again with, it’s certainly that industry,” he stated.

Source: The Canadian Press

Related News

Canada’s Unemployment Rate Hits its Highest Point Since 2017

Canada’s Unemployment Rate Hits its Highest Point Since 2017