Canada launches $53-million strategy to combat COVID-19 variants as experts warn of potential third wave

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a new strategy Friday to address variants of concern in the COVID-19 pandemic. The strategy aims to ramp up monitoring of viral variants originating in Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom and identify emerging ones by rapidly expanding Canada's surveillance, sequencing and research efforts.

“We’re putting our best experts on it—researchers, epidemiologists, modellers,” the Prime Minister said in a speech from Ottawa. “With investments like this, Canada is ready to detect, track and treat new cases.” 

The Variants of Concern Strategy is being supported by $53 million in new funding and brings together the Public Health Agency of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory, the Canadian COVID Genomics Network (CanCOGen), the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) as well as the provinces and territories.

Disease experts are warning policymakers that a third wave of the pandemic, caused by the rapid spread of these new variants, could begin as early as March and undo recent progress at keeping the COVID-19 virus in check. 

The rapid spread of several new variants underscores the need for robust monitoring. Spotting emerging variants quickly and working out their biology is essential to keeping Canadians safe. The evidence is already clear that the new variants, which share some mutations, are much more transmissible than the dominant strains circulating to date.

However, critical questions remain: Do the variants cause more severe disease? Are they capable of immune escape, or dodging a person’s natural or vaccine-induced immune response? Will the current vaccines, and other public health measures, be effective against these emerging variants?

To address these questions and others, CIHR is investing up to $25 million in three separate but linked initiatives.

First, a new COVID-19 rapid response competition is focused on understanding the immune response to emerging variants and the potential for immune evasion. Second, an operating grant competition will support the creation of the CIHR Network for Emerging Variants Research to coordinate variant research and better connect research and surveillance efforts. A third opportunity will fund an existing pool of project grant applications related to SARS-CoV-2. 

CanCOGen is providing $8 million to increase Canada’s genomic sequencing capacity and ability to share genomic data in real time. The network was launched in April 2020 to coordinate genomic surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus across Canada as well as the sharing of sequence data internationally. 

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