Canada needs to turn its COVID-19 aid attention to expanding vaccine production everywhere or the virus will continue to run wild, mutate and bring new waves of disease, says a prominent expert.

Dr. Madhukar Pai, a Canada Research Chair in epidemiology and global health at McGill University, told the House of Commons foreign affairs committee he doesn’t think rich countries like Canada have learned a thing from the first two years of the pandemic.

“The selfishness, greed, and myopia of the richest countries in the world that we have seen the naked display of in the last two years, I’m 100 percent convinced in the next crisis, we will behave the same way,” he said Monday.

In the rush to get a vaccine to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy countries like Canada signed multiple advance-purchase agreements with several vaccine makers in a bid to be close to the front of the line when those vaccines were ready for use.

At the same time, Canada and many others signed on to the COVAX vaccine-sharing alliance, the goal of which was to have wealthy countries help less well-off ones buy vaccine doses.

But when the vaccines first arrived, the initial doses were almost entirely spoken for by a small number of rich countries, leaving everyone else to wait.

As of May 5, three in every four people in the wealthiest countries were fully vaccinated and almost half had a third or even a fourth dose. In the lowest-income countries, 12.5 percent of people are fully vaccinated, and less than one percent is boosted.

Vaccinations in lower-income countries have picked up, with more than 79 million doses administered in 2022 to date compared with 74.5 million in all of 2021.

Vaccine supplies are no longer an issue, with lower demand in high-income countries and more production everywhere. Limiting factors now are getting the available doses into arms before they expire and overcoming hesitancy which in some cases is fuelled by the fact so many people have already had COVID-19.

Pai said if Canada wants to be truly selfish it would do everything it can to get more vaccines into arms everywhere around the world.

The more the virus spreads the more chances it has to mutate, leading to variants like Omicron that are partially escaping vaccine protection. While the existing vaccines still provide excellent protection against severe illness they’re not preventing the spread of infection as well as they did with earlier variants, further risking more mutations.