Health committee  Good morning, everyone. I was not expecting to start with a six-minute statement, so I will start by telling you that I'm a professor at Université Laval. Before that, I was in Winnipeg as the chief of the special pathogens program at the National Microbiology Laboratory, NML, w

Health committee  I did have many discussions with Roger, who was acting as the secretary, the coordinator, of that committee. That was mainly over the phone. I did communicate my concern also in several emails. I'll go back to my concerns. The task force was formed in June 2020, but was not know

Health committee  Yes, I will add that actually I did appreciate everything that Dr. Lewis said. I think he's spot on. What you can see after just a few minutes in this discussion is that there is a disconnect between, for example, what was stated by NRC, that everything is done and that the bes

Health committee  It has never been funded at all. We received $1 million to do the pre-clinical study. The only track we had then to go and get money was the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, CIHR. We applied first and they said there was not enough preliminary data. We got back with all th

Health committee  You point out opportunities where we could have done better, and this will be helpful in the future. I think this indicates that a connection between the funded projects under development has been missing from the beginning. I am referring here to the models in Great Britain and

Health committee  Absolutely not. I actually voiced very strong concerns despite the fact that, to my surprise, this was officially the first recommendation of the committee. We've never really discussed it, so I don't know how it made it as a first recommendation.

Health committee  It's not up to me. You would have to ask, but I think it would be normal, yes.

Health committee  I would answer this way. I advised the committee to not only be very transparent with everything that touches the vaccine, which is the vaccine task force, but even to include a person from the media to record the meetings from the beginning. This did not happen, of course. I w

Health committee  No.

Health committee  I'm sorry, I don't know the exact structure past the chair and co-chair, unfortunately. I don't exactly know how it works.

Health committee  Initially, the first priority was to have access to vaccines from big pharma, which was done. The Canadian federal government did very well there by signing seven contracts. The second priority was to build up from day one, not to wait to build up capacity in Canada. This meant

Health committee  Thank you for your question. There have, however, been some major investments, notably in AbCellera. The National Research Council of Canada, NRC, received $56 million for the vaccine from CanSino Biologics, which went nowhere. There have been other major investments. One of th

Health committee  This is just a matter of opinion. There was evidence of conflicts of interest, at least from my perspective, including that one member sold the equipment for $20 million, while being on the task force to the federal government for doing fill and finish. I think this was informa

Health committee  Absolutely, they should have been reviewed before starting the work with this task force, like for every other.... I do conflict of interest statements monthly for the WHO. They are due before we open the line. If they are not done, we cannot participate.

Health committee  The answer is yes, we should. Media was also present for the meeting at the WHO, which could also be done here.