Thank you for the question.
There has been a lot of work done on first nations. Importantly, we wanted to make sure that we actually recognized that specific responsibility that Health Canada has to provide health services to first nations. So we did an important organizational thing, which was to bring in an incident commander, Dr. Gully, who's been here I think many times to report on progress. He met with first nations leadership across the country to ensure that some of the lessons learned out of the spring session were in fact being implemented: that protective equipment and other key medical equipment was put in place; that there was an adequate supply of antivirals; that vaccination campaigns were ready to go.
Having looked at this just the other day, my sense is that first nations are actually participating in numbers far in excess of the general population in vaccination campaigns. The numbers that I saw were around 50%, just below 50%, but they didn't actually have figures from last week. That's opposed to where we are now, which would probably be in the 25% to more than 30% range across the country for the general population. My sense also is that in terms of the incidence of H1N1 that we've seen this fall, the incidence in first nations seems to mirror much more closely the incidence in the general population as opposed to what we saw in the spring.
We've also invested heavily in working with the AFN on getting the message out to first nations. The minister referred to the virtual summit that took place a couple of weeks ago that involved the national chief, Dr. Butler-Jones, Dr. Gully, and you. I think a lot of work has taken place and the results I think have improved.