Canada has one of the most rigorous regulatory authorities in the world. Any vaccine, before it gets to widespread use in a population, has to undergo a series of clinical trials—phase one, phase two and phase three studies with an increasing number of people in them—that look for safety and efficacy.
Prior to being released, they need to be studied in thousands of people. These current COVID trials have had over 30,000 to 40,000 people in all of them before they get to the point of emergency authorization. Even at that stage, a study of 30,000 or 40,000 is not going to detect adverse events that occur in more than one in 1,000 people. If one wants to assure the safety, even for more rare adverse events, one needs to have post-use surveillance within the country. Canada has developed a very rigorous augmented surveillance system in order to look at COVID-19 vaccines as these vaccine programs roll out.
Safety is one of the most important things people are concerned about in terms of hesitancy. People are hesitant for a variety of reasons, and that's normal and expected. We want people to want to know about the vaccines before they receive them. We need to be able to provide them with the type of information they need, while considering how they want the information and from whom they want the information, in order to make sure we get the highest rates of vaccine uptake.