How can it not be a global crisis? Every month, millions of people are affected by this crisis.
I'll just give you India as an example. In just three months, April, May and June of last year, 2.7 million Indians died. That is almost a million deaths a month. That is how devastating this virus can be. Every year we fail to act is adding more and more deaths and economic losses.
To me, time is of the essence. Just sitting on this for years and years.... The fact that we're even doing a study on vaccine equity in the third year is so disappointing to me in and of itself. What is there to study? We have to act. Lives are at stake, and our own security is at stake. Canada will pay for this. I'm sorry. We will be suffering for many months to come if we don't act purely out of selfishness. If we don't want to do the right thing for altruistic reasons, fine. Let's do it for pure selfish internal-looking reasons. Let's do the right thing.