Nathaniel Erskine-Smith at the Industry, Science and Technology Committee

On February 18th, 2021. See this statement in context.

February 18th, 2021 / 11:20 a.m.

Liberal

Nathaniel Erskine-Smith Liberal Beaches—East York, ON

I first want to say that I very much appreciate your volunteer efforts in the course of this crisis to help us get through it.

Like many Canadians, I have family in the United States and I have family in the United Kingdom. There is recent news that the United Kingdom has vaccinated 15 million people. Largely, they have been successful in that rollout, from what I can tell, because of AstraZeneca.

I have a few questions going forward, but I first want to spend a little bit of time looking back.

When we look at AstraZeneca in particular, they seem to have had a great head start in their research. The U.K. entered into an agreement with them at the end of April, and I'm curious about what the exploration process was. We've heard some testimony related to how the NRC could have produced AstraZeneca's vaccine and has produced similar vaccines previously. I'm wondering what the exploration was of that opportunity—licensing AstraZeneca and building at the NRC.

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