Dr. Khan, I'm curious about your thoughts, as a infectious disease specialist, on the current deal that Health Canada has made with China on developing a COVID-19 vaccine.
The announcement mentioned that the National Research Council is working with CanSino Biologics to advance a vaccine, which is being developed jointly with the People's Liberation Army. Apparently Health Canada has even approved the first human clinical trial that will be run at Dalhousie University in spite of the fact that CanSino has not published any data from its first trial phase for any sort of public scrutiny.
This really shocked me. Vaccine development cycles are normally 10 to 15 years, and the shortest ever was four years. Our Five Eyes intelligence alliance has raised concerns regarding China's transparency regarding this particular pandemic. They even denied, initially, human-to-human contact. And some whistle-blowers have disappeared.
If we want Canadians to buy into a COVID-19 vaccine, wouldn't it make more sense to be working with a more trustworthy partner on this sort of thing? Does it strike you as being dangerous?