Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being here today. This is so important. The work you've been doing on this is vital.
Over the weekend and last week, we heard about the new development of the omicron XE variant, which is, of course, extremely worrying. It means that what we're doing here today is that much more important.
I have to start by saying that I'm extremely frustrated that we are in this position, that we are still debating and still discussing some of the issues that we're discussing today. The first time I raised this issue within the foreign affairs committee was actually on November 17, 2020, when I asked to ensure that we had an equitable way to make sure that countries around the world could access vaccines, and that they would not all be procured and snatched up by wealthy countries at the expense of global health. Obviously, when we look at the history of how vaccines have been rolled out during the COVID pandemic, that has not been the case.
I guess that's where I'll start today. Some of my colleagues have already brought up the idea that the pharmaceutical companies have been given the power to determine who gets a vaccine and who doesn't. Of course, when you leave a corporation, whose reason for being is profit, in charge of rolling out life-saving vaccines, you are not going to have an equitable rollout. We know that the profits that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have made are around $34 billion in 2021, despite the fact that they received $8 billion in public funding.
Perhaps I'll ask our colleagues from Oxfam to comment first. Could you give us a little more insight on what it means when we give corporations the power to determine who is able to be vaccinated and who is able to access vaccines, rather than treating this as a public health thing that is determined in a more equitable way?