Thank you. It's a pleasure to answer that question.
You're absolutely right. At the outset of the pandemic, when Canada went looking for the capacity that it could rely on to develop and manufacture a COVID vaccine, it found a sector that had been largely diminishing over many years. I could certainly turn to my colleague Darryl Patterson on that. He could describe to you some of the major exits over the last few decades.
Before I do that, I might really emphasize that, having done that survey and having looked for a number of very core capacity attributes.... We were looking for the ability to manufacture vaccines across major different vaccine platforms. As I'm sure most of the members of this committee will know, not all pathogens are the same and not all vaccines are the same. They're not all built on the same platform. In order to have a resilient biomanufacturing and life sciences sector, you need a diversity of capacity that cuts across multiple platforms, because you just don't know what pathogen is going to hit you.
As I mentioned, there are different parts of the value chain, all the way from basic science and R and D through to commercialization and so-called fill and finish. Canada had very little capacity on the back end. We've really prioritized investments now such that, when we look and we do the math on the investments that have been made, we've gone from a position where we had very little capacity at scale to fill and finish vaccines to where we have an ability to fill and finish approximately 300 million to 400 million doses per year across platforms.
Of course, that not only puts us in a position to be able to serve the domestic needs of Canadians, even in situations where you would need multiple vaccines in a given year, but it also puts the sector on a sustainable footing in order to be able to provide much-needed assistance globally.