Industry committee  I'd like to start by echoing the remarks of my co-chair. I am delighted to be with you today. It has truly been an honour to serve on the vaccine task force. I have been struck by how much can get done in a relatively short period of time when you bring together the right peopl

Industry committee  Yes, there were various Canadian proposals at various stages of development. Just to reiterate one of Joanne's points, all of these were done in parallel. It wasn't a case of looking at CanSino and then waiting to look at others. We looked at the international candidates and th

Industry committee  I would comment that AstraZeneca, as you know, is one of the seven vaccines we recommended. In terms of being able to get it to Canada as quickly as possible, it was deemed that would be best through providing it from other countries. There is always the possibility to look at ma

Industry committee  Vaccine manufacturing is very complex and it takes time. To think that one could announce a concept to do that and actually sign a licensing deal, do the technology transfer, bring it here, and have it up and running faster than when we expect to receive it, I don't think that wo

Industry committee  My understanding is that the Government of Canada has spoken with all the companies to see who might be interested in manufacturing in Canada. It would seem to be that Novavax was a company that wanted to do that. Again, it's unprecedented to make billions of doses of vaccines i

Industry committee  There have been a number of SIF proposals that we've reviewed, and there have been some investments. One of them is Precision NanoSystems, where investment has been made to expand the mRNA capacity there. There are other proposals under discussion and the government is committed

Industry committee  I was with Connaught and Sanofi Pasteur for 33 years. I retired from that organization in December 2016, having served the last 17 years as president. The campus that you're referring to is over 50 acres at Dufferin and Steeles. It has over a million square feet of space. It is s

Industry committee  Yes. Over the years, the quality assurance, the desire to assure vaccine quality as opposed to the testing, has risen dramatically. There are all sorts of efforts around not just getting regulatory approval for the vaccines but also for the site itself, for all the compliance pro

Industry committee  My understanding is that they had considered making some investments before the pandemic. This is something they had thought about and had plans in place for and designs under way for. They were able to hit the ground floor running, so to speak, in making those investments. They

Industry committee  Sure. If we're talking about the approvals of the licences for products that are licensed in different places around the world, one of the things Joanne talked about and that has been paramount to everything we've done is that science should rule the day. While great progress ha

Industry committee  The mRNA technology is new. It's been around for 10 years in terms of the science, but there's never, until now, been a product commercialized using RNA technology, so this is a great breakthrough. As a world, I think we're very fortunate that the RNA technology was there and we

Industry committee  Right now, Connaught/Sanofi Pasteur does not have RNA technology in place for their manufacturing, so they would have to gear that up and start to build a facility that could do that manufacturing. To your earlier point, there are other candidate vaccines in Canada that are work

Industry committee  Well, it's different bulk manufacturing equipment. It's a different way of utilizing it, so it's a different manufacturing technique for the bulk product.

Industry committee  You could put RNA technology into an existing manufacturing site. It would likely be a new building, new equipment, renovating a new room. It would be different equipment.

Industry committee  I could maybe comment on a couple things, based on my experience in the vaccine industry. The vaccines are coming. We've seen them. The delivery schedules and what's been happening this week versus delay until next week...I don't think anybody in the industry ever thought they w