I don't mind speaking more in my capacity as a public health doctor on this front. Quite apart from Canada's decision to execute its options through the COVAX program, which would provide us with additional vaccine supplies by the end of June, hopefully our own vaccine procurement will have accelerated before then and we won't need those supplies and we'll able to ensure that countries that are actually still desperately holding out for additional support will be able to receive it.
The bottom line here, though, is that we have now 70 low-income countries that are very unlikely to have access to vaccines in the foreseeable future and in the countries in which War Child Canada is operating, we are looking at best at a scenario where one out of every 10 people is vaccinated by the end of this year and possibly into early next year.
What concerns me the most is what conversations are taking place to ensure that we do have a much more aggressive strategy around ensuring that particularly vulnerable, high-risk communities have access to the vaccination, that that vaccine is being deployed, that the capacity exists to be able to vaccinate. I'm thinking very specifically around issues of migration and displacement. We are one of the few organizations very active on the border between Sudan and Ethiopia in response to the arrival of Tigrayan refugees that took place over the last couple of months. Many tens of thousands of them are arriving. The more you have this kind of displacement, the more vulnerability, the more crowded conditions.... You've got very few humanitarian organizations that are on the ground, implementing there right now, because of the constraints related to COVID. You are talking about parts of the world where COVID could really become entrenched, where new variants can emerge, and it is a threat to all of us.
My own position on this is that we understand, as Canadians, as much as anyone else right now what it feels like to watch other countries get vaccinated while our seniors face real consequences in long-term care homes. We, I hope, will not endeavour to do that to any other country on this earth. I hope that we will be thoughtful and [Technical Difficulty-Editor] moving forward on this issue and that we will recognize that it is in all of our best interests to ensure that the most vulnerable, and especially those living in impoverished, crowded conditions, are vaccinated as soon as humanly possible and have an equal stake and an equal share in that opportunity.