I think it's such a terrible position for Canada to be taking. Canada is essentially siding with big pharma, which wants to protect their patent rights, and frankly it's quite out of line with what Trudeau would normally be expected to do. He's very interested in his image as a progressive.
I think what this speaks to is the fact that the Trudeau government is very anxious to do what the big pharmaceutical companies want, because Canada feels so vulnerable when we don't have a vaccine supply of our own. I think this is just exactly the kind of problem that we would be correcting when we recreated something like Connaught Labs. We shouldn't be so much at the mercy of the big pharmaceutical companies, which is what we are.
The other thing that the big pharmaceutical companies are very anxious to push on the Canadian government—and I can see Sanofi trying to use the negotiations with Ottawa over this—is to push for Trudeau to back off from the changes he's announced to the patented medicines regulations, changes that are designed to reduce the price of drugs by billions of dollars for Canadians.
Let's not end up getting a vaccine supply through a private supplier, like Sanofi, in exchange for giving up the right to bring down drug prices in Canada. That would be a terrible trade-off.