Thank you very much for inviting me to take part in this meeting. I will speak mainly in English.
Still, I want to emphasis that I am currently the co-chair of the Public Health Network Council of Canada. It is a mechanism we have to work together with the federal government, the provinces and territories on public health issues.
I should also mention that at the time of the pandemic, I was not the co-president; I was basically the chief medical officer for Alberta. I played a role in some of the working groups as part of the PHN Council and as one of the members.
I was involved in all aspects of the process. For example, I co-chaired one of the working groups, or expert groups, dealing with isolated and remote communities and how to modulate the response in those kinds of settings. That was one of the working groups that fed information to the pandemic coordination committee, which then advised the Public Health Network members, and ultimately, the Conference of Deputy Ministers of Health on the decisions that had to be made.
I don't really have a lot to add to what Dr. Spika said. Basically, even though the pandemic plan is designed to deal with pandemics in a generic way, we really rely on the epidemiology of each pandemic to ascertain what the response will have to look like in its fine details, including prioritization for immunization.
It was in the lessons learned during the first wave of the pandemic that the evidence started to emerge, as was mentioned by Dr. Spika, with regard to some particular groups that were at higher risk of severe illness. These included pregnant women, people with chronic medical conditions, some people living in aboriginal communities, and very young children. That provided the evidence for the expert group, which had been put in place to advise us on prioritization, to do its work over the summer and come up with the recommendations that Dr. Spika outlined.
I'm not going to add anything else at this point. I'll wait for questions that come up. I know that you have two other speakers who will provide additional details.