I could take that question.
I'll go back to some earlier comments. When we looked at securing safe and efficacious vaccines for Canadians as soon as possible, it became clear that sourcing international potential candidates was going to be the quickest way. We very much looked at domestic candidates and, as was mentioned earlier, having some of those international companies make some agreements with Canada.
If you look at the worldwide vaccine business, generally speaking, and it's the case with COVID vaccines as well, the drug substance and the bulk manufacturing are easier to scale up—not easier in terms of capability, but in terms of quantity. The shortfall is often in fill and finish, filling and packaging, so the bulk drug substance gets made, but there's a bottleneck in filling and packaging. So we did have discussions, and the Government of Canada had discussions, with companies to try to get them to establish fill-and-finish agreements here in Canada, and one has been announced.
In terms of doing a technology transfer, whether there is a TRIPS agreement or not, the whole process around tech transfer and transferring that to a Canadian entity and scaling that up would be time-consuming. It certainly wouldn't have gotten us vaccines this year, and I don't think it would have gotten us vaccines next year. It is something that is being looked at in, what I might call, a more “medium-term” or “longer-term solution” for supplying Canadians with pandemic vaccines sourced here, but they weren't going to be part of the immediate response. They certainly are being very much looked at, as I said, for the intermediate to longer term.
