Good morning, honourable colleagues. Welcome to meeting No. 15 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
Pursuant to the motion adopted on January 31, the committee is meeting on its study of vaccine equity and intellectual property rights.
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Colleagues, it gives me great pleasure to welcome now our first panel of witnesses before the committee and to thank them for agreeing to take the time to be with us this morning. We have with us from Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, Dr. Seth Berkley, chief executive officer. From the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, we have Lily Caprani, head of advocacy and global lead for global health vaccines and pandemic response.
Welcome to both of you.
Colleagues, we are also waiting to hear from Dr. Ayoade Alakija, special envoy and co-chair of the ACT-Accelerator. She is on our witness list this morning on behalf of WHO. She has some technical problems with respect to a connection, and we're hoping she'll be able to join us in the course of our discussion this morning.
With that, I would like to give each of our witnesses five minutes for their opening remarks, after which we will begin the discussion with members.
Dr. Berkley, if you would like to lead us off on behalf of Gavi with five minutes for opening remarks, the floor is yours.