Thank you for this question. I get asked this very often, so it's very pertinent. It's very important to understand the role.
We do both, anyway. The government can ask us for advice. Sometimes it requires a report, a small study or a round table, but we are absolutely free to decide on issues of importance that we want to investigate.
Long COVID is a good example, because we had been tracking the issue for a while and we'd had discussions with the Minister of Health about it, who then felt something substantive needed to happen that was beyond the Department of Health, because, of course, the Department of Health provides this.
There are a number of things we do. We provide science notes—