Health committee  Thank you. I'm pleased to be able to speak to the committee looking at the COVID-19 pandemic and the issues that have been raised. A number of them are very important. One of the big issues that was raised was equity. There was inequity in the impact of the disease based on ag

Health committee  I can answer that wearing several different hats, my provincial hat, my Public Health Agency of Canada consultant hat, and also my WHO consultant hat. Relatively speaking, Canada, depending on which province you were in, did brilliantly well or did not. We had quite a range acro

Health committee  There are two things I would raise in regard to that. Number one is that the whole emphasis that I tried to put forward is that we really need to be teaching people how to do critical thinking, so they can understand when people are speaking to them whether or not they are usin

Health committee  Sure. Again, Canada was kind of a middle of the road. We did not shut our schools as completely as a number of other countries did, but we already have evidence that this still had a negative impact on the development of children, on their reading and writing skills. I think we

Health committee  Let me stick to a couple of points, and I need to give full disclosure here. I was a founding member of the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety with the World Health Organization, so this is something that I've been very involved with for more than 25 years. There is som

Health committee  I wish we could give you some magic silver dust that we could sprinkle across the country. There isn't any magic silver dust. What we do know is that there need to be multiple strategies. We need to look very specifically at what the issues are in the communities where we're no

Health committee  I'm sorry; I could talk for hours on this.

Health committee  Great.

Health committee  I have a couple of quick points that I hope with make this more understandable. It's complex. One of the problems in South Africa is that over 80% of people have had COVID. They do not see the value of having the vaccine, even though we know that in having had COVID, particular

Health committee  I've been asked this many times and it's not simple. We would love it if it became endemic, didn't mutate further, and moved to being a “meek and mild” virus. It hasn't quite gotten to meek and mild. We still have people dying from omicron. We still have people being hospitalize

Health committee  I want to be a real infectious disease physician, now. Listen, mask-wearing is not that hard, folks. In a number of countries in the world, even pre-COVID, people were wearing masks all the time. Masks really decrease respiratory viral infection transmission—influenza, parainfl

Health committee  That's exactly my point. That's why I'm saying we've never seen politics intrude so much in health policy decision-making as we've seen throughout COVID. Do you know what? Most politicians don't have the science background to sift through that information and make evidence-based

Health committee  We think these vaccines are actually going to last longer than what we had originally anticipated. We do know that on the fourth doses that have been given to those over 70, it was not to boost them above the level they were at before, but to get them back up to that higher lev

Health committee  The data I've looked at from WHO would suggest—I'm going to say this so carefully—that it's not due to COVID. Because of the huge numbers of COVID disease even in children, if this were really related to COVID, we should see it. I want to turn that 90 degrees to say that some pe

Health committee  Okay. If you had never been immunized and you got omicron, you are not as well protected as if you'd had your two doses of vaccine, because we know that for omicron, when we test it, your antibody response to that doesn't take out delta very well if another delta variant comes al