Health committee  A number of metrics would be used. First is looking at what we call “escape infection” and the rates of escape infection: people who have been vaccinated and the rate at which you get new infections. If that rate goes above what is the expected efficacy of the vaccine, then it ma

Health committee  It will depend on the supply dynamics. As you've identified, there are factors that come into this which are very difficult to predict, but there's a strong likelihood that people may be faced with receiving a second vaccine that is not the same as the first. That's why we've set

Health committee  All the data I've seen to date support this strategy. I think there are certain groups in the population that need to be considered, especially the elderly and those with immune deficiencies. They may need to have a second dose sooner, or as soon as possible. Regarding the other

Health committee  I believe that most of the people who took part in the study had been hospitalized following infection.

Health committee  Thank you for these questions. I'll begin by saying that the vaccination rate of 50% to 60% is a minimum. In the UK, 50% to 53% of the population has received a first dose of the vaccine, and we're seeing that the infection rate continues to drop there. I believe that a similar

Health committee  I have a couple of quick things to say. The first is that, yes, the international experience is extremely important and in part because the U.K. and Israel, as you mentioned, were well ahead of Canada in the rollout of their vaccines. They have a time advantage on us. In additio

Health committee  That's an excellent question, and there are three dimensions of it that I'd like to address. First, I think we're much closer today to having immune measures that are what we call correlates of protection. Not to go into detail, but anybody who has gone into the depths of immuno

Health committee  I think we're moving to a situation where, as with a lot of coronaviruses, we could manage this through vaccinations such that it affects people at worst like a cold, and limits severe illness, hospitalization and death to a very large degree.

Health committee  We have a number of studies that are looking at what the duration of protection is, not only from natural infection, as I stated earlier, but also from vaccines, and in different types of populations. We just supported a number of studies that are looking at, for example, immunoc

Health committee  These studies are now enrolling patients as the vaccines roll out, and I think the important issue is the extent to which you can generate valid findings over time. When duration is one of the variables, then it's hard to accelerate or diminish that time interval. To give you a

Health committee  The closest we would come to informing discussions on that is our work on modelling trajectories toward herd immunity, because that's really going to be the evidence that allows us to understand just how long we're going to be in this crisis.

Health committee  I have data on the seroprevalence surveys. We do not have data on the causality at the moment, no.

Health committee  I think many investigators will be looking at this, and I've seen various studies, but I don't have a definitive list for you at this time.

Health committee  There are a number of provinces that have provincial surveillance systems. In particular, British Columbia and Quebec have very good surveillance systems looking at the trends in immunity over time with a single dose, or the “first dose fast” strategy. The task force has support

Health committee  The country that's furthest ahead in this is the U.K. They published data last week that gives us an indication of the effectiveness of a single dose in that population as much as 12 weeks out. I don't think they have the 16-week data at this time, so we'll have to wait a little