Let me stick to a couple of points, and I need to give full disclosure here. I was a founding member of the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety with the World Health Organization, so this is something that I've been very involved with for more than 25 years.
There is something we did not do well, and we know that communication is key. We know that negative information sticks three times as much as positive information, so how you present risks and benefits of a vaccine really, really matters. The language matters, how you frame it, how you tell the story. We had too many people who did not understand all the safety components we had in place in Canada and how all the vaccines that were approved here in Canada followed all of those steps. There we none that didn't follow those steps. Their approval required that.
We did not do good communication. People, again, jumped ahead of what the data was. There were inferences drawn that were just wrong. I think we should actually be proud. We picked up adverse events that were exceedingly rare. When you're talking about one in 700,000, that's not a common thing to happen, but when you're giving millions and millions and millions of doses, you're going to see some of those events. I think that was a surprise for the general public and maybe for some of the people who were not involved as much in public health and in immunization, where we fully knew this was going to happen, but our communications were not as they should have been.
When these events happened, I don't think we necessarily addressed them in such a way that people could understand the context and understand what they meant and didn't mean. I think there are many people out there who think that the adenoviral vector vaccines are terrible because you can get thrombosis and thrombocytopenia. They don't know that you get by far a higher rate of those with COVID disease than with the vaccine, for example.