Why Canucks are at the back of the line for Covid vaccine

Earlier this week, Just In Trudeau, Prime Minister of All Canuckistan, told virus-weary Canadians that they would have to wait for "a while" to get any of the Covid-19 vaccines that will soon be made available to Americans, Germans, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, Indians (the south Asian kind) and even citizens of Rumbabaland. Why so? Because, Mr Socks admitted, Canada "no longer" has any vaccine-manufacturing capacity of its own. Any vaccine which Canucks may get... later... will have to be imported. 

Agent 3 was puzzled by Hairboy's explanation ["excuse", shurely. Ed.] because he (3) remembers, as a young man, walking past an imposing building near the University of Toronto named Connaught Laboratories, which he understood to be a manufacturer of vaccines and other medicines. What (he wonders) happened to Connaught Labs? 

It turns out that Connaught Medical Research Laboratories was an early victim of... wait for it... globalization. 

The non-commercial public health entity was established in Toronto in 1914 in Toronto to produce the diphtheria antitoxin. Contemporaneously, the institution was likened to the Pasteur Institutes in France and Belgium and the Lister Institute in London. It expanded significantly after the discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921, manufacturing and distributing insulin at cost in Canada and overseas.

Connaught's non-commercial mandate mediated commercial interests and kept the medication accessible not just to Canadians but (as the map shows) to subjects of His Britannic Majesty around the world. In the 1930s, methodological advances at Connaught updated the international standard for insulin production. Efforts at Connaught to purify heparin for human clinical trials lay the foundation for various critical surgeries including vascular surgery, organ transplantation and cardiac surgery. 

During World Wars I and II, the Labs produced various antitoxins that became crucial due to increased risks of injury infection and exposure to diseases in other parts of the world, including the typhus vaccine and penicillin. Connaught's production technologies also enabled the mass-scale field trial of Jonas Salk's polio vaccine and its subsequent expansion. The institution played a particularly important role in restoring the faith of the American public in the polio vaccine after a production mishap at California-based Cutter Laboratories. 

Connaught Labs was taken over in 1972, during the reign of Emperor Trudeau I, by the Canada Development Corporation (CDC), a federally-owned corporation charged with developing and maintaining Canadian-controlled companies in the private sector through a mixture of public and private investment. Today,  the globalists and one-worlders would condemn such a move as "nationalist" or "protectionist", contrary to the spirit of free trade.

As surely as day follows night, the state-owned enterprise increased prices on its products and came under allegations of mismanagement and deteriorated manufacturing standards. In 1986, Connaught were transferred to private ownership as the CDC was dismantled as part of the neo-conservative Mulroney government's programme of privatization. 

Three years later, Connaught was "merged with" (read: sold out to) the French Institut Mérieux. In 19 1999 it was transformed into the Canadian component of "Pasteur Mérieux Connaught", owned by Rhône-Poulenc, another French outfit. A series of acquisitions since then have transferred ownership of what used to be the Connaught Laboratories to the global vaccine business of Sanofi, which distributes its output primarily to the people of, errr, France.

That's what happens, folks, when you declare that your country is "open for business again", which really means "for sale to the highest bidder". These days the highest bidder is likely to the country with all the money, and we know which one that is. Right?