International Trade committee  I think this is timely. There's a report from the Public Health Agency of Canada that talks about measures that have helped. Certainly there were difficult discussions in the first year, but we fared better than many other countries in the world did—the United States and those in Europe—in limiting morbidity and mortality from the disease.

International Trade committee  I'll answer the last question first. I have not had a discussion with the Public Health Agency of Canada about the rationale for vaccine requirements—especially after some of us started questioning exactly what the requirements were. I will say that many provinces recognized that proof of vaccination outside of special domains like health care and long-term care was unlikely to offer a significant benefit to the population to reduce transmission, and it was largely dropped.

International Trade committee  Yes, absolutely, and again, we've seen this across the world. More than 100 countries have largely dropped their border restrictions, the last being New Zealand, which is a country that really embraced every measure possible to reduce transmission. There's been a recognition that the measures at the border were not offering significant benefit and were causing significant pandemic disruption and that efforts locally were more important.

International Trade committee  We will likely have waves of transmission. How we mitigate those and how we mitigate things like isolation and health care, which are big problems as we move forward, how we mitigate vaccinations and vaccine fatigue and how we mitigate access to therapeutics are really going to define how impactful these waves are going to be.

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. The big thing we're looking at is what's happening in Europe right now, where the virus continues to evolve. I think we all agree with that. The pathway for the virus to evolve is more immune evasion. As we have more populations that are immunized and more populations that have been infected, the virus is only going to gain mutations to then evade immunity more and more, which makes proof of vaccination even less prioritized in that context, given that with two doses, three doses or even four doses of vaccination, there will likely be a breakthrough rate that is significant, with a time-limited benefit to vaccinations for preventing infections.

International Trade committee  Thank you for the question. Obviously hindsight is 20/20. I would say, though, that the data we used to generate that report really was about the lack of efficacy around a vaccine mandate for preventing transmission. Community transmission in local domains was much higher than what would be expected with travel.

International Trade committee  Thank you.

International Trade committee  Hello, everyone, and good morning. Thanks for allowing me to appear as a witness for the Standing Committee on International Trade's study of the potential impacts of the ArriveCAN application on certain Canadian sectors. My name is Zain Chagla. I'm an infectious disease physician, medical director of infection control at St.