Thank you to the committee for inviting me.
Very briefly, I'm an M.D. Ph.D. pediatrician-scientist and I co-lead efforts to develop vaccines for neglected diseases of poverty in addition to coronavirus infection vaccines and a new COVID-19 vaccine. For the last two decades, we've built an academic research centre known as a PDP, a product development partnership, and we use industry practices to make the pharmaceuticals that industry generally won't produce because they mostly target diseases of the poor.
Our PDP is know as the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine. We've now developed a low-cost recombinant protein vaccine to prevent COVID-19. Some refer to it as a people's vaccine because it could be scaled for production at extremely low cost, we think as low as $1.50 U.S. per dose, and it requires simple refrigeration. Biological E., one of the big vaccine producers, has now started to scale up production to more than one billion doses, and the Indian regulatory authority has now given us the green light to advance it to phase 3 clinical trials with the hope that there will be an emergency-use authorization in India later this summer. In parallel, CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, is working with Biological E. for a global road map for phase 3 trials internationally.
There's just one other biographical piece. I do have a meaningful Canada connection. My grandfather Morris Goldberg grew up in the Jewish quarter of Paris and emigrated to Montreal around the time of World War I. Years later, he lost many family members during the Nazi occupation of Paris, so I always like to say that I exist only because of the goodness of the Canadian people who accepted my grandfather, and I've never forgotten that.
Today, I hope to raise two issues, one on COVID-19 vaccinations and the other on COVID-19 vaccines. With regard to vaccinations, according to the New York Times tracker, as of yesterday, only 3.2% of Canada's population has been fully immunized, and just under 40% has received a single dose.
In contrast, in the U.S. the numbers are 34% fully immunized and 46% having had a single dose. In the U.S. we also do have our problems though. We have a troubling blue- and red-state divide so that the real situation is that states such as Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut will reach the point where almost one-half of their populations are fully immunized, whereas deep red states such as Idaho and Wyoming and the mountain area in our southern states are only about one-quarter in. This disparity reflects an awful level of anti-vaccine aggression in our country.