Health committee  Well, at the moment I've just been back in Canada for the last year and I don't know enough of the background, but it's still a mystery to me. I think that's the simplest statement I can make.

Health committee  I had not before any of this occurred. After the first evaluation, the first phase was to look at a pre-proposal from each applicant and decide which ones would then be asked for a full proposal. After that, there was a gap. Then there was a request for people to review a second

Health committee  No.

Health committee  I don't know exactly what is being considered right now in terms of alternate uses for the funds. Having been involved in many HIV projects, a lot of funds are spent on clinical trials. A lot of funds are spent on research, but it's been clear for some years that the gap between

Health committee  Let me give you a quick vocabulary lesson. GLP, good laboratory practice, is usually applicable to the very earliest stages of developing a vaccine. GMP, good manufacturing practice, is what you have do when making a product that will go into a person either at the clinical level

Health committee  I can answer that in a positive sort of way. There was a significant investment when, for instance, we put in the facility in Alberta for making similar scale...similar in terms of stage of going from research to manufacturing lots of material for industrial biotech. But the cons

Health committee  Well, first of all, it's clear that Canada has spent enormous sums of money developing expertise in infectious disease and vaccines since, really, the inception a very long time ago of Connaught Laboratories, and Canada has been a world leader in this. To say without a lot of det

Health committee  If the government says everyone's incompetent, then people tend to believe that more than what would be said otherwise. Incompetence is my word, but that's the message I think that was essentially delivered. It's hard then for people to go to outside agencies, or to the Gates Fou

Health committee  In looking for exactly that kind of capacity and doing a very detailed assessment of GMP capabilities and quality aspects a few years ago, we came down to a very small number. There was one in Germany where the German government had invested a large sum of money to make a very ni

Health committee  Hello. My name is Don Gerson, and I've been involved in manufacturing vaccines for the last 25 or more years. I've produced, under my direction, over 3.5 billion doses of vaccine, some in Canada as head of manufacturing at Connaught Labs and some at other companies around the wor