Thank you.
I want to thank the witnesses for giving insight on this. This is an ongoing issue, and it is still a pretty pressing issue, even though we see that rates in Canada have gone down and vaccine uptake is very high.
I would like to find out if any of the witnesses can elaborate on how practical a TRIPS waiver would be, taking in the time...how long it would take to build a facility specifically for the mRNA type of vaccines, which would procure the ingredients and manufacture and deliver vaccines.
We've seen that here, even though funding support announcements were made immediately when COVID-19 happened, the facilities are just coming up now. It takes almost two years.
Even if we were to do a TRIPS waiver—if the world were able to do that—how practical would it be? Would facilities be up and running and getting ingredients? If it takes the same timeline in Canada or the western world, it would essentially take almost two years. I don't know if that has been taken into account.
Can somebody elaborate on that?