At the height of the pandemic in February of 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he had found a partner to make millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines in a new factory his government was building to assuage concerns that Canada didn’t have enough manufacturing capacity to make its own shots.

More than three years later, that partner, Novavax Inc., won’t be making vaccines at the publicly owned plant in Montreal for the 2024-2025 season, which is part of the reason the federal government isn’t ordering any of the company’s shots for Canadians.

Novavax’s decision has left managers of the Biologics Manufacturing Centre (BMC), which was built with nearly $130-million in federal funds, working to drum up other business for a 55,000-square-foot plant that was completed in the summer of 2021. No other vaccines or biologic medications are currently being made there, according to the president of the non-profit corporation that oversees the BMC.