I agree completely with you. Really, this is about this idea of partnerships and multiple stakeholders. In order to set priorities, I think we need to be looking at what capacities we have and what kind of expertise we have domestically in different research and therapeutic areas. We need to be talking to patients, families and care providers who are on the ground every day and understanding what it is that they need. I think we also need to be looking at what are the public health priorities.
It's a real mix. I don't have a formula that I can easily hand to you. It's really about this idea of partnerships, but also about international coordination. We shouldn't be duplicating efforts and working in competition. We should be working in collaboration with what other countries are doing and working towards shared goals or different ones.
Just briefly, you mentioned that we do set priorities. I agree with you. In fact, CIHR has their research priorities that they've opened up various amounts of funding for—some of them small, some of them large. There's also an exercise that I believe was led by the Public Health Agency of Canada to identify vaccines that were priorities for research and development. I believe that's available on their website.
There are priorities that have been set that address public health needs. We should be allowing those to drive some of these experiments and alternative ways of actually developing products. It's about taking this priority that maybe has already been set and, as I said, thinking through it from start to finish and thinking about how we end up with a product that meets the needs of patients and health systems and is affordable and accessible. That's where we need to be talking about models and about the policies that we should have in place that commit us to access and affordability, so that public funding results in a return on public investment.