If you take a step back in time to June, July and August when we were getting going, it's a bit of a mind-boggling task that we were given to recommend....
Our mandate was to provide advice to secure safe and efficacious vaccines for Canadians as soon as possible.
At that time, there were no vaccines licensed or developed; they were under way for being developed. There were international candidates and domestic candidates and we had to assess, review and meet with companies and come up with recommendations about what vaccines might be available in the future. When we provided advice to the government, the seven candidate vaccines that we recommended across three platforms weren't even approved yet. There was a risk in buying, securing and entering into agreements for products that weren't even licensed yet.
The government took our advice; they reacted to it and moved to quickly secure advance purchase agreements.