Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to elaborate on the response offered on October 5 by my colleague, the Minister of Health, to the hon. member's question concerning the rollout of the H1N1 vaccine in Canada relative to our neighbours in the south.
Canada's vaccine rollout, the largest mass immunization effort that has ever been attempted in this country, has proven to be remarkably successful. It is very unfortunate that the member was not in committee today, because many of her new direct questions were answered in committee by officials and they were very positive responses for the government. She will be happy to know that.
Earlier this week, Canada's chief public health officer confirmed that by the end of this week some 21 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine will have been distributed across this country. More to the point, by the end of next week, assuming that all goes as planned, we will have delivered enough vaccine to provincial and territorial health officials to immunize roughly 75% of Canadians, the target that we set this summer when we announced our immunization targets.
The Government of Canada has always maintained that its overarching priority was to ensure that we get a safe and effective H1N1 vaccine into the arms of Canadians in a timely way. We made it clear that we are not competing with other countries to see who would get there first and that we would not cut corners where safety was concerned. We promised that nobody would be left behind and that by Christmas, every single Canadian who needed or wanted to be immunized would be able to access the vaccine.
I am confident the member opposite will agree with me that we have met all of these commitments and that Canadians have reason to be proud of the successful partnership between the Government of Canada and the provinces and territories to respond to the H1N1 outbreak.
When members reflect back to just a few short months ago, when the World Health Organization confirmed the emergence of a novel strain of influenza virus that might be a precursor to a global influenza pandemic, I am sure they would agree that Canada has accomplished a great deal.
For sure, there have been a few bumps along the road. That can only be expected when complex and sensitive policy decisions need to be made against a backdrop of constantly evolving science and knowledge about a new virus that the world has never previously seen and whose characteristics and attack rates are unknown and about a vaccine to protect against that virus that needs to be developed from scratch, safety tested, mass produced and delivered to tens of millions of people.
At the end of the day, the bottom line remains: Canada was up to the challenge. We delivered on our commitments. We made the right decisions and we met our duty to Canadians. That is what Canadians care about. Based on reports from the provinces and territories, we can safely say that roughly one-third of Canadians have already been vaccinated. Since our H1N1 vaccine rollout began at the end of October, we delivered enough vaccine for every Canadian identified as part of a target group. Last week, every province opened their vaccine clinics to all Canadians.
I have some great facts to bring forward for the member so she will know how well Canada has done and how well this Conservative government has delivered for Canadians.
Just six weeks into the H1N1 vaccine rollout, we have already distributed over 20 million doses of the H1N1 vaccine across every region of Canada. Rural and remote regions of the country have not been left behind. People residing in these communities, many of them aboriginal and Inuit people, were among the primary target groups for vaccination. At this stage, on a per capita basis, we have more vaccine distributed and more people immunized than almost any other country in the world.
We never accepted the notion that we were competing with other jurisdictions to be first out of the gate. We did what we committed to do.