Department of Political Science & Public Administration, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Int J Health Policy Manag. 2023;12:6936. doi: 10.34172/ijhpm.2023.6936. Epub 2023 May 27.
Analysing the Canadian government's efforts to support the development of COVID-19 "medical countermeasures" (MCMs), this article seeks insights into political economy as a driver of pandemic response. We explore whether Canadian public funding policy during the pandemic involved departures from established practices of financialisation in biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D), including the dominance of private sector involvement in an intellectual property (IP) intensive approach to innovation underscoring profit, and governance opacity.
We interrogate public funding for MCMs by analyzing how much the Government of Canada (GoC) spent, how those funds were allocated, on what terms, and to whom. We identify the funding institutions, and the funds awarded between February 10, 2020, and March 31, 2021, to support the research, development, and manufacturing of MCMs, including diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, and information about clinical management and virus transmission. To collect these data, we conducted searches on the Internet, public data repositories, and filed several requests under the Access to (1985). Subsequently, we carried out a document-based analysis of electronically accessible research contracts, proposals, grant calls, and policy announcements.
The GoC announced CAD$ 1.4 billion for research, development and manufacturing of COVID-19 MCMs. Fully 68% (CAD$ 959 million) of the announced public funding was channelled to investment in private sector firms. Canadian public funding showed a consistent focus on early and late stage development of COVID-19 MCMs and the expansion of biopharmaceutical manufacturing capacity. Assessing whether Canada's investments into developing COVID-19 MCMs safeguard affordable and transparent access to the products of publicly funded research, we found that access policies on IP management, sharing of clinical data, affordability and availability were not systematic, consistent, or transparent, and few, if any, mechanisms ensured long-term sustainability.
Beyond incremental change in policy goals, such as public investment in domestic biomanufacturing, the features of Canadian public policies endorsing financialization in the biopharmaceutical sector remained largely unchanged during the pandemic.
本文分析了加拿大政府支持 COVID-19“医疗对策”（MCM）发展的努力，旨在探讨政治经济学作为大流行应对驱动力的作用。我们探讨了大流行期间加拿大公共资金政策是否背离了生物制药研发（R&D）中金融化的既定做法，包括在知识产权（IP）密集型创新方法中私营部门的主导地位，这种方法强调利润和治理不透明。
我们通过分析加拿大政府（GoC）在 2020 年 2 月 10 日至 2021 年 3 月 31 日期间用于支持 MCM 的研究、开发和制造的资金支出、资金分配、条件和对象，对 MCM 进行公共资金审查。我们确定了资助机构以及在此期间授予的资金，以支持 MCM 的研究、开发和制造，包括诊断、疫苗、疗法以及有关临床管理和病毒传播的信息。为了收集这些数据，我们在互联网、公共数据存储库上进行了搜索，并根据《信息获取法》（1985 年）提出了多项请求。随后，我们对电子获取的研究合同、提案、赠款呼吁和政策公告进行了基于文件的分析。
GoC 宣布为 COVID-19 MCM 的研究、开发和制造提供 14 亿加元。宣布的公共资金中有 68%（9.59 亿加元）用于投资私营部门公司。加拿大公共资金一直专注于 COVID-19 MCM 的早期和后期开发以及扩大生物制药制造能力。评估加拿大对开发 COVID-19 MCM 的投资是否保障了公众资助研究成果的负担得起和透明获取，我们发现知识产权管理、临床数据共享、可负担性和可用性方面的获取政策不系统、不一致或不透明，而且几乎没有任何机制确保长期可持续性。
除了政策目标的增量变化，例如对国内生物制造的公共投资之外，大流行期间，支持生物制药部门金融化的加拿大公共政策的特征基本保持不变。
