Good morning, Chair.
I'm Amir Attaran. I'm a professor of law and public health at the University of Ottawa. I want to give you some of my background so you'll know why I'm speaking on the things I am.
I'm a scientist by training. My Ph.D. is in cell biology and immunology from Oxford University. I'm a lawyer from UBC. I taught public health at Yale. I taught government at Harvard. I'm a bit of a generalist.
In my work, I've advised organizations such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the UN development programme, Médecins sans Frontières and various pharmaceutical industries on health. In fact, I worked in the pharma industry, at Novartis, most interestingly, on a project where we had to scale up drug production by 6,000% in one year and solve the manufacturing and distribution problem.
Now, that reminds me of where we're at, because we now have a problem of too few vaccinations in the country. Per capita, Canada is lagging behind most of our peers. We've had fewer vaccinations than the U.S., the U.K. or the European Union. This is occurring for reasons I warned about in Maclean's magazine last August, and I'm very unhappy to see much of that proved correct.
I'm going to point to three areas where I think all parties agree that things are unacceptable. My goal is to try to tell you how you work together on those three issues.
The first is transparency, which is really just pathetically lacking. The current government I think has done a terrible job on the transparency of its efforts. On the work of the vaccine task force, for instance, none of the meeting minutes are public. It appears not to have met since last October. None of the conflict-of-interest declarations signed by the members are public.
We don't really know what's going on in that committee, and it doesn't inspire confidence. You can't have the most important science decisions in generations being made secretly. That has to end, and if it doesn't, my fear is that it will contribute to a bad-tempered political environment, where you fight with each other so much that you don't solve the substantive problems, and that wouldn't be desirable for Canadians.
Point two, the biggest substantive problem is manufacturing. Canada needs to build resilience to supply interruptions for vaccines. We've seen what happens when our supplies are cut by Pfizer and Moderna. We've seen what happens with the European Union potentially shutting off exports when Canada is 100% dependent on European exports of vaccines right now.
Countries like Australia, India, Japan and Brazil are manufacturing. The way they do it is that they voluntarily license and contract the production of the vaccines. This is, by the way, how the manufacturers themselves work. Moderna, Novavax and AstraZeneca are producing that product not in their own facilities, for the most part, but by contracting out production to other companies you've never heard of, like Lonza, Fujifilm and Emergent.
I think this is an important question for Parliament to grapple with: Why not pay those same contractors of the vaccine firms to lay on another batch for Canada, particularly in North American facilities where the supply interruptions would not be the same as with the European Union—