Health committee  Thank you for the question. I believe Canada's official position on this is that it does not yet have an official position, which is to say that Canada is sort of officially saying that it's not rejecting the proposal. To cut right to the chase, countries should be supporting

Health committee  I think the point you're getting at is that this is a global public health emergency and what happens in one country affects all of us everywhere. Disease control and public health interventions that are applied inequitably or only in one country will simply not be effective at e

Health committee  Good afternoon, and thank you to the committee for having me back today. It has been said many times that this is a global pandemic that requires global solidarity and global actions. In addition to protecting Canadians, it is essential that our government unite behind a truly g

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Absolutely. One of the first messages we had at the beginning of this was that it's absolutely essential that public health measures that effectively curtail people's abilities to move around need to be proportionate and respectful of people's human rights and their ability to a

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have an answer immediately at my fingertips. I think that what we're seeing around the world is a really complex set of circumstances. I'm not sure there's necessarily one place that has hit it out of the park, so to speak. We've seen a lot of count

Subcommittee on International Human Rights committee  No.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I think that's certainly one option. We were talking about funding in 2020. COVAX is talking about funding in 2021, so I think it's absolutely going to be important. There's a conversation to be had, as well.... Canada has procured a large number of vaccine doses, and I th

Foreign Affairs committee  Absolutely. Maybe I'll come back to my earlier comment that with all of these initiatives, the devil is in the details. I mentioned the example of the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in the previous AMC. Just to give you a sense of what that looks like, in that instance the vacc

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, this is the second time that there's been an advance market commitment, an AMC, that's been created for a new vaccine. The first one was for the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine, and that was created about a decade ago. The basic idea is that we pool funds together, and it de

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, since the beginning of the pandemic, we've been pushing for greater transparency in these licensing agreements. There are a number of reasons behind that. I'll just jump to the point here and say that we are a medical care provider that is concerned about how vaccines are g

Health committee  I'm not a recipient of CIHR funding at the moment, but to the best of my knowledge, no, I'm not aware of there being such a requirement.

Health committee  Absolutely. This is one of the things that we recommended to the committee in the previous Parliament during this exact study: that funding provided for the development of drugs, vaccines, diagnostic tests and other health technologies should be conditional on recipients of publi

Health committee  I've said this a few times now, but the pace at which the science is unfurling in the COVID-19 vaccine and therapeutics development is absolutely unprecedented. When I wrote that op-ed, the CanSino collaboration agreement didn't exist yet. I think that point is emphasized by wha

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. One of the roles of international organizations is, in fact, to develop what are called target product profiles. What is the ideal profile of the vaccine that would be deployed around the world? In designing the ideal set of parameters that we would want a Canadi

Health committee  Thanks for the question. As I mentioned in my statement, the short answer is that we are seeing these statements being made by a variety of different heads of state and other actors that seem to be committing to these sorts of principles, let's say, of global public goods, of pe