I could add to that as well, Mr. Chair, if possible. Thank you.
We work closely with our international counterparts and we know that many countries, as well as the WHO, have an advisory committee of experts similar to Canada's. We often see these advisory committees having common threads of understanding, as Dr. Tam mentioned, but we also see areas of deviation. What's important to understand and remember is that every country has a unique context and a unique environment. In the case of the WHO, they are in fact speaking to the entire global context.
In Canada, NACI is taking the Canadian information and evidence, the Canadian supply context and the available products into consideration. The WHO has certainly not recommended against bivalent products; it is recommending that those can be included as part of the booster suite, but it is not making a distinction or a preference among the different products, whereas in Canada, based on the supply context, the availability of the products and NACI's expert assessment, the recommendation was in fact that the bivalent products could be preferred.
I think an important level-setting piece of information is that all of these countries are recommending booster programs. It's now a question of which product among the suite of available products might give the best edge, and there will be different expert assessments again as the evidence continues to evolve on that.
At the end of the day, WHO, NACI and other countries are recommending that boosters should be used as part of a fall framework, as part of a preparedness against the winter season and the strains to come. We are seeing the bivalents being recommended and used quite broadly in Canada, Germany and the U.S. There has been a preferential direction towards bivalents. I think there is actually not a large gap between the positions of NACI and the WHO on this.
Thank you.