Health committee  I'll be the contrarian. I think it's a difficult challenge. I don't think it's a good or bad idea. I think the reason it's a challenge is that one can see arguing this in the short term very much in favour of trying to just expand global vaccine supply as fast as possible. I unde

Health committee  Sure. I think what you want to do is to try to increase supply rapidly without making this an unattractive area for companies in which to work in future. I'd love it if we could circle back around to what our future challenges are going to be, because COVID is going to be done a

Health committee  Right. Increasingly, I think, public health has become a data-focused discipline. I mean that how we understand processes, how we see them, really depends on the data we have. It's unfortunate, I think, that in my province, Ontario, we have a bit of a track record where we've sun

Health committee  Sure. Sorry.

Health committee  Just to be clear, I don't have a role on the Ontario vaccine task force at all. I am on the science table in Ontario and the modelling table, and I can give you my perspective more as someone who is looking at data rather than designing new systems.

Health committee  I can also possibly make a comment as a physician. I think, to my mind, we're doing some good stuff. The marvellous observation over the last month or so is we've had long-term care facilities in Ontario serve as a major source of death during this pandemic and the Pfizer vacci

Health committee  Thank you so much. Honourable members of the committee, I'm pleased to speak to you today. It's been approximately one year since I last appeared before you, and it has been a year like no other. While we have had many surprises, perhaps most surprising to me is the degree to wh

Health committee  We don't know but we can be highly suspicious that it would help us a lot. Especially if we can get the reproduction number of the disease down to around one. That's a tipping point. At that tipping point, very small changes in infection transmissibility can really make the epide

Health committee  This is not our work. There's a marvellous mathematician at Waterloo by the name of Chris Bauch who has a paper looking at regional reopening in Ontario as opposed to blanket policies, with the outcome of interest being how we can minimize the amount of time in lockdown. I think

Health committee  Do you know what? I'm not sure to what extent I can talk about private conversations in this public forum but, as I speak to colleagues across the country, what is clear to me is that the places that got the job done were aware of their deficiencies as laboratory systems and work

Health committee  I think what you're referring to was our paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, CMAJ, in March. Our model looks a lot like most other models by competent modelling groups. It looks like the publication by a guy named Steve Kissler, in Science, that happened about a mo

Health committee  Honestly, it's a dilemma. I think I mentioned earlier that the signature of this disease is that it takes off with big gatherings, so there's a lot you can probably reopen economically, safely, if you stay away from large gatherings of people. The one big gathering that's reall

Health committee  I think the idea is that economically it holds a country back. Even if we have 40% of our workforce able to work from home, for the parents, it's often difficult to get their jobs done if they're minding children in parallel. However, yes, it's an issue. Countries like Korea ha

Health committee  Thank you very much. There are a lot of moving parts here. Herd immunity can be approximated as a function of the reproduction number of the disease. The higher the reproduction number, the more people need to be immune if the disease is not to take off. That's why we see measle

Health committee  I'll tell you, my group at University of Toronto call ourselves “data raccoons”, because we've sort of managed to thrive for about 15 years on data that most people regard as garbage, so it's sort of a bit of the normal state of affairs for us with public health data analysis. Th