One thing I want to start with is that certainly we've seen, from a global zoonotic perspective, that H5N1 has been a significant issue since 2021, as you noted and as my colleague Dr. Furness spoke to, in the animal context. The risk for humans does continue over time, and the risk for animals, as she noted, obviously wildlife, poultry and other mammals, continues over time. Therefore, we have to be vigilant, and we have to have a lot of proactive preparedness, which is the approach we've taken with our partners across different departments.
We're speaking about vaccines, but vaccines are one part of the preparedness package. You need to have six different pillars of preparedness, including surveillance, laboratory diagnostics and modelling, risk assessment—and not a “one and done” risk assessment, but ongoing and updated risk assessment—guidance for health professionals and resources, medical countermeasures including vaccines but also antivirals, for example, for humans, as well as scientific evidence, research gaps and readiness for outbreaks if they were to occur.
We've made significant progress, especially since 2024, when we saw the novel spillover, which was unexpected—highly unexpected and the first globally—from birds into dairy cattle in the U.S. Dairy cattle was a brand new host, if you will, of the virus and that obviously resulted in significant impacts in the dairy industry in the U.S., but there were also human cases. I think there were up to 66 human cases in the U.S. Again, they had been in very low numbers prior to that.
As part of that readiness, we did, obviously, advance our work on vaccine procurement in 2024, and we made that decision for a modest supply.
I want to highlight some of the objectives of that modest supply. It's important to know the context. The primary objective, in fact, was for pandemic readiness. As you may know, multiple countries in the world have purchased a stockpile of H5 vaccines for readiness, not for broad deployment, and that is our primary objective: for use in the event of a pandemic. We had a potential across the border from our neighbour, our friendly neighbour across the way, for avian influenza to rapidly move into Canada through dairy, poultry or humans, so we needed to have those vaccines there. Our secondary objective was to provide a small supply for potential, targeted use for those populations most at risk.
We had two objectives there, and the primary one was readiness. In terms of those doses, from our learnings and improvement over time, we purchased 870,000 doses. In a best-case scenario, you would have high vaccine uptake and little to no wastage, but that is very challenging when you have 10 doses in one vial. Someone might need to be vaccinated in a rural area of Saskatchewan and someone else in a city, and you might have to use one vial for one person.
All that is to say that 870,000 doses would allow you to vaccinate a maximum of 435,000 people in Canada. That represents 1% of the Canadian population, and our decision was to procure a supply that was quite modest. We need to have some kind of insurance policy. If we were to have a pandemic on our doorstep and no vaccine, it would be at least 14 to 20 weeks before we could get access to a pandemic vaccine.
That is why we took that readiness approach.
