Madam Speaker, do my colleagues remember Gary Kobinger, a Université Laval researcher? He is the expert who became famous for his discovery of the Ebola vaccine, and he is also the expert who, at the start of the pandemic, developed a COVID‑19 vaccine candidate. Unfortunately, Ottawa denied him funding for clinical trials.
Canada still does not have a made-in-Canada vaccine or a modern pharmaceutical industry, and now it no longer has Dr. Kobinger either. The University of Texas put him in charge of one of the most prestigious biomedical research labs in the world.
Why did the government not do everything in its power to develop a local vaccine—