Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To you both, thanks for attending today.
Mr. Vigneault, you've attended a couple of times.
I think I've canvassed all of the questions that I'm interested in canvassing with respect to Ms. Drouin specifically, but I am interested.... Paragraph 21 of the June 2020 security assessment stood out only because we've just lived through a pandemic. It says, “QIU...and other [Wuhan Institute of Virology] employees were approved by a Chinese evaluation committee to conduct a 'CAS High-end User Nurturing Project'”. That was “from June 2019 to May 2021”—ostensibly, the time period for that project. The project “planned to use reverse genetics in order to create synthetic virus strains. This was to assess cross-species infection and pathogenic risks of bat filoviruses for future vaccine development purposes, which suggests that gain-of-function (GOF) studies were possibly to take place.”
I don't want to go down a conspiracy rabbit hole here, but American agencies have said that a lab leak is low...limited evidence, all things considered, but that is the most plausible reality here. What should I make of this? When I read this, paragraph 21 certainly stands out in the context of having just lived through a pandemic. What should I make of it? What should parliamentarians make of it?