I want to go to the timeline with regard to the acquisition of the vaccines here in Canada. We can go back to May, when the National Research Council entered into the agreement with CanSino. On May 12 the NRC publicly announced the deal; on May 16 the Prime Minister then commented on it. Three days later was when the government became aware that the candidate doses were being held back in China, and that wasn't disclosed to the public until July of that year. Subsequently, in August, the government announced its new agreements with Moderna and Pfizer.
Your establishment took place in June. What information was presented to you by the National Research Council or by the government to assist? Were there other candidates that the government had considered at the time or wanted you to proceed to look at before you went ahead with your recommendations to the government on those two vaccines?
It seems to me that we lost those three critical months; that instead of having another recommendation available, you were just starting from scratch.