Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
You mentioned the SARS epidemic. If I'm not completely mistaken, this epidemic just stopped without much being done. There were hundreds of deaths, not thousands or tens of thousands.
The interesting thing that happened after the epidemic was over, from a researcher's standpoint, was that a lot of the funding to study this virus dried up. It's not that nothing was done, but many things came to an end. We, the scientists, read papers from 2007 and so on in small journals that do groundwork in basic science, indicating how many other coronaviruses are out there in pets and how many other variants have been found.
This is the danger in funding research ad hoc and then letting it dry up. I don't want to say that if the research on SARS would have gone fully funded for the years after that we would not have been in this pandemic, but I think it's very dangerous to say, okay, this pandemic stopped so we don't need to fund anything anymore. SARS has shown that this may have been a mistake, with all careful consideration.
I wanted to make this point because when we discussed this on our board and among our colleagues, this was a point that was absolutely stressed. Thank you.