Dr. Tam, Canada is set to receive 1.9 million vaccine doses from COVAX. That's a bigger allocation than dozens of other countries are going to receive, including Haiti, Mali, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Papua New Guinea and Namibia, and the list goes on.
To you as an international public health officer, this is a globally mobile virus, and given that equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is key to ending the global pandemic and preventing the emergence of vaccine-resistant variants, isn't it in Canada's interest to leave these doses for high-risk populations in low-income countries? Are we going to be unaffected by high-risk populations being unvaccinated in the world while we vaccinate low-risk people here?