COVID-19 clinical trials in Canada drop with China's refusal to ship potential vaccine

#Canada; #Halifax; #COVID19Vaccine; #Collaboration; #NRC; #CanSinoBiologics

Ottawa, Aug 27 (Canadian-Media): The rising tensions tensions between Canada and China resulted in the ceasing of the collaboration between a Chinese company CanSino Biologics and a Halifax research team aiming to carry out Canada's first clinical trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine, media reports said.

 Ad5-ncov. Image credit: Facebook page

Vaccines are urgently needed by the federal governments across the world subject to the safety and efficacy of clinical trials shown in thousands of human volunteers before administering these to the  general public.

The Chinese company, ​CanSino's vaccine, called Ad5-nCoV, was already being run through human trials in China and had shown promising results. 

In May of this year a partnership was announced by the federal government of Canada  between Canada's publicly funded National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and CanSino Biologics to allow NRC to scale up the technology needed to produce sufficient number of potential vaccines to protect Canadians.

The Canadian Centre for Vaccinology at Dalhousie University was supposed to work with CanSino to run the first Canadian clinical trials for a possible COVID-19 vaccine.

But CBC News was told by NRC that the Chinese customs had not approved the vaccine candidate to be shipped to Canada. 

"Subsequent to signing [the agreement], the government of China introduced process changes regarding shipping vaccines to other countries," the NRC said in a statement. "The process is not clear to the NRC, but CanSino does not have the authority to ship the vaccine at this time."