Yes, I think removing the necessity for a country to first express intent to procure from a Canadian company will certainly cut through a lot of the inhibitions, as I mentioned.
First, the tender process is the process through which a company decides which company it wants to procure from. So it's a bit irrational for countries to be required to express interest in a particular company if no other company is able to offer. So I think if that requirement is removed from this legislation, as you say, it will give companies more flexibility. It will also give them flexibility to respond to countries' needs as they change over time, and having a maximum quantity that a company is able to provide for a particular country is also not always a realistic thing for a country to do, if the epidemic changes significantly over the time in which the licence has been granted.
With regard to what I refer to as a false dichotomy, because that's really what it is, between infrastructure systems versus availability of medicines, I really think the two need to go hand in hand. One of the things we have seen is that clearly the ARV treatment, especially in southern Africa, contributes significantly to strengthening health systems, to strengthening infrastructure.
So it's obvious that if we don't have infrastructure, the drugs themselves cannot achieve their full potential, but it's really clear that without the drugs, there's very little we can do with the infrastructure. For someone who is living with HIV in southern Africa, the difference between life and death is really whether they have affordable medicine they can get access to in order to live. I think one of the things that discourages many governments from making the investment in infrastructure is not knowing whether they will be able to afford the treatment that will go with the infrastructure over the next five years or 10 years, especially with the threat to generics that we are currently experiencing.
I would emphasize that the role of access to affordable medicine is really what triggered the greatest degree of progress in the HIV response over the past decade, and it needs to be sustained.