I wish we could give you some magic silver dust that we could sprinkle across the country. There isn't any magic silver dust.
What we do know is that there need to be multiple strategies. We need to look very specifically at what the issues are in the communities where we're not having the uptake we need. We need to look at what their barriers are, their enablers and what we can do to make that happen.
I'm sorry that I can't be more precise. I give lectures that are an hour long that only touch the tip of the iceberg of the question you just asked.
There are a couple of things that we know make a difference. I wish we could get more people singing from the same song sheet, because we know it matters. That's why I pulled up the politicians in our health care system.
The other thing was—and Dr. Paes really said it—we didn't necessarily make this easy for people to get immunized. We didn't give them the opportunities to come in at 9 o'clock on a Saturday night or a Sunday night. We made it hard, and that undermined it.
The other thing—and everybody here better nod their heads—is that we all want COVID done. We are tired of it, and the general public is tired of it, but that has not made it go away. We're likely going to see problems to come.
I know we've done well, if we look overall, compared to the U.S., for example. However, we shouldn't be holding them up as a comparator, because they haven't done well. We've done quite well at doing two doses. We seriously need to do well with those 60 and up, with three doses; and at 70 and up, we need to do well with four doses, and for those who have underlying problems. Again, if we had a fully integrated patient-centred health information system, we would know who all of those people are, and so would the pharmacist when they walked in. Then, we would be able to really target all of those groups to get exactly what they need.
At the current time, we can't tell you who's missing. We can tell you who got immunized for COVID, but we can't tell you who's missing because we don't have that kind of information system.
Over.