H5N1 bird flu: Does Canada have vaccines ready for an outbreak?

As the bird flu continues spreading in the U.S., Canadian officials are in talks with several pharmaceutical companies about potential agreements to produce an avian flu vaccine.

As the bird flu outbreak continues spreading south of the border, Canadian officials are in talks with several pharmaceutical companies about potential agreements to produce an avian flu vaccine for humans.

There is no avian influenza vaccine available in Canada for public use, according to Health Canada’s website. Canada is also not currently stockpiling human avian flu vaccines, but this could change in the future, according to federal health officials.

“The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has proactively met with pandemic influenza vaccine suppliers (e.g., GSK, Seqirus and Sanofi) with whom we have an agreement for domestic or off-shore vaccine manufacturing to discuss pandemic influenza vaccine preparedness activities in order to inform steps that could be taken against avian influenza,” a PHAC spokesperson told Global News in a Friday email.

“These activities include obtaining an H5N1 candidate vaccine virus, and the possibility of producing pre-pandemic vaccine if and when production capacity is freed up from producing the seasonal influenza vaccines.”

The bird flu virus has been spreading among more animal species in scores of countries since 2020. It was detected in U.S. dairy herds in March, and since then at least three people — all workers at farms with infected cows — have been diagnosed with bird flu, although the illnesses were considered mild.

But earlier versions of the same H5N1 flu virus have been highly lethal to humans in other parts of the world. Officials are taking steps to be prepared if the virus mutates in a way that makes it more deadly or enables it to spread more easily from person to person.

While it is rare for the virus to spread to humans, experts warn that it could mutate and become more transmissible, posing a significant health threat due to its potential lethality.

“The bird flu has surprised us over and over and over,” said Kerry Bowman, a professor of bioethics and global health at the University of Toronto. “People didn’t predict it would jump to mammals and that mammals would give it to each other. But then look what happened.”