This is something that I feel passionate about. I think we all, as public health professionals, feel passionate about this. When you're dealing with an epidemic or a pandemic, when you're dealing with a public health crisis, you need to use all the levers you have in order to interrupt transmission and to save lives. From that perspective, when we talk about a multi-layered approach, we talk about vaccines as part of our tool kit and we talk about public health measures. We've learned over time how effective those public health measures are, whether they be for the wild strain of the vaccine or for variants. We know, very clearly, that masking, physical distancing and washing hands—all of those public health measures—work. That's why they've become so important to our multi-layered response.
We also, of course, rely on Canadians and know that Canadians are sacrificing and doing so much to ensure that we are controlling the spread of this virus in all of its forms.
Public health is a team sport. We know that and we need to work in collaboration with the whole of society as we tackle this very complicated problem. We don't have all the answers and we don't pretend to. Nobody does. But what we're doing every day is getting more data, doing analysis and trying things out. Sometimes you take a risk and you try something out and then you collect data as you go to see whether or not your best-informed public health interventions are working. We're in that space right now. We've been in it since the beginning of this pandemic. We'll continue to be in it as we now roll out vaccines at the same time as we reinforce public health measures and work with Canadians in communities to ensure that they maintain confidence in the vaccines that are being provided and that they will access over the next short while, as the number of vaccines delivered to our country increases.
I'll stop there. I probably have been a little bit too impassioned. I feel very strongly that we use our levers, we adjust our levers, we use evidence and we apply evidence very effectively in Canada in order to deal with this devastating pandemic.