Ottawa: Canada has joined the European Union (EU) and other countries in a global effort to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 when the country’s five provinces began easing restrictions on businesses and services imposed during the pandemic.
The goal of the EU-initiated “Coronavirus Global Response” is to raise more than $8 billion for medical research, and the Canadian government has so far committed for $604 million toward vaccine development and finding treatments for the disease, reports Xinhua news agency.
“It is really important that the world comes together to collaborate,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his daily COVID-19 news conference here on Monday.
“We know that the safety of our own citizens depends on how we keep people around the world safe,” Trudeau said, adding, “We need to take care of ourselves by taking care of the rest of the world. Even once we find a vaccine, whether it’s in Canada or elsewhere around the world, we will share the vaccine in its formula.”
Trudeau also spoke with Bill and Melinda Gates last week about the need to support the event and to promote co-operation in developing and distributing a vaccine and not just to those in wealthy countries. The Gates Foundation is one of the leading international players in the search of a vaccine.
Like Canada, other countries are trying to develop a vaccine formula or treatment that will allow the world to stop the pandemic and return to a state of normalcy. “But discovering a viable vaccine won’t be enough to prevent future outbreaks,” said the head of the World Health Organization.
The true measure of success will not only be how fast we can develop safe and effective tools — it will be how equally we can distribute them,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO. “The potential for continued waves of infection of COVID-19 across the globe demands that every single person on the planet be protected from this disease.”
Countries are already working together to pool research and data to help in the development of a vaccine, and work has already begun to plot out a way to manufacture a viable formula on a worldwide scale, according to Canada’s health minister.
“It is almost like a race, but a race where you want everyone to be able to cross the finish line at once,” Health Minister Patty Hajdu said at a briefing on Monday. She said that while every country wants to find a way to vaccine their own citizens against the virus, everyone in the world will be at risk until a vaccine is made available worldwide.
On the same day, Canada’s two largest provinces gave the green light to the reopening of mainly the seasonal businesses in Ontario, and storefront retail operations outside the Montreal area in Quebec.
The Montreal metropolis has more than half of the province’s COVID-19 cases, and with no sign of the pandemic curve flattening, Quebec Premier Francois Legault announced on Monday that the opening of retail stores in the province’s most populous region, scheduled for next May 11, would be delayed by a week.
Ontario, the other virus epicenter, was allowing for a few, mostly seasonal businesses to reopen, including garden centers with curbside pickups, lawn care and landscaping companies, and automatic car washes.
Meanwhile, non-essential medical activities, such as dentistry and physiotherapy can now resume in the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, as well as in Manitoba, which also authorized restaurants to open patios and hair salons to welcome customers. Schools will remain mostly shuttered in Canada, except for in Quebec, where elementary students will begin returning to their classrooms next Monday.
There were a total of 60,772 COVID-19 cases in Canada with 3,854 deaths.
