Thank you.
It started some time ago. We were stymied in gaining access to additional data to link with the databases that we already had. Those were actions by the province and the BCCDC. It really became most clear when we published the rapid review.
I don't understand Professor Nosyk's remark. He clearly is not interested in dialogue. He signed a letter that maligned, publicly, our work. The only time I've spoken to him, he told me that he was emotionally angered by it, because at the time he had responsibilities to conduct research on safe supply. Almost all the signatories—well, all the signatories of that letter that I know—have financial interests in the very topic we were reviewing. We didn't conclude anything that was unusual at the time. It was that there was an absence of evidence. Professor Nosyk has even confirmed that today, saying that things were just getting started.
What we did was point out an awkward thing, which was that the standards for introducing a pharmaceutical in any form of practice in our country and around the world typically follow rigorous assessments of their safety and their effectiveness. In this case, we decided that we were going to implement a measure without any of the controls we used for COVID vaccines—looking for positive effects, if there were any, and for harms, if there were any. We simply launched into it.
As we now know, the studies that were produced were fashioned on the fly. There was no traceable component in the drugs that we introduced in order to enable, in a fairly obvious way, the ability to detect diversion if it was occurring. Not only do we have this odd mashup of evidence today, but more importantly, we clearly adopted a double standard in proceeding with this very experiment. Is that because of the people we're discussing?