The issue is very serious, because it's not just a lack of coverage of vitamin A.
As a quick recap for the committee, vitamin A has been shown to reduce child mortality by up to 24% if you can get two capsules into a child in the space of a year. It reduces deaths from pneumonia, particularly from measles and diarrhea.
Canada has been a leader in this issue. The world supply is produced in Ontario. It costs two cents per capsule, and it has to be the best example of a return on investment that there is.
As you rightly said, 100 million children have missed their round and more are scheduled to miss rounds as well.
Our modus operandi at Nutrition International is to work alongside governments and strengthen their ability, but in these cases, governments are overwhelmed. Working with partners like UNICEF to scale up child health days and working to strengthen government systems so that they can be on top of it the next time is critical.
What we're worried about is that if you interrupt regular vaccines such as for measles at the same time, you leave the population remarkably vulnerable to dying from things that we thought we had already put behind us for the most part. We're seeing a resurgence of these kinds of deaths.
Vitamin A cuts measles prevalence, for example, by 50%.