Health committee  At this point, based on our recommendation from March 1—because nothing else has been issued since; it's still in the works—provinces and territories still have the ability to decide what they want, but what we had said was to try to use that vaccine in people up to 64 years of a

Health committee  As I said before, I would have preferred to be within the label. However, what we decided to do here—given the doses we had and the at-risk population we had—was to try to give that first dose to as many people as possible.

Health committee  Other people are currently looking at that too, and they're wondering if that's not something they should also do. Because we have good effectiveness surveillance data, I think that saying we can go up to four months, and being able to shorten that interval as needed, is absolute

Health committee  When we do expert opinion recommendations, we state it. It happens that we have to do such a thing; that's why we're an expert committee. It's the same thing when I treat a patient; I don't always have all the data, and I don't always have all the facts in the science to be able

Health committee  I will try to answer your question. I'm not convinced that I fully understood it. In terms of asymptomatic infections, that data is being collected in various studies. We know that, for AstraZeneca, which looked at this factor when the other companies did not—we will at least gi

Health committee  They have already been compiled—

Health committee  You right that it's very complicated because there are so many numbers. Basically, 60% is the overall efficacy estimate, but if you look at people who got it with a longer interval, so 12 weeks and over, you're right that it then goes up to over 80%. In real-world effectiveness i

Health committee  There are two Public Health England publications. I can't remember exactly what journals they were in. Those two studies are being added to the corpus of the evidence. They are all real-world effectiveness. We do not have new efficacy data. These will come out when the U.S. trial

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  Correct.

Health committee  I wasn't talking about power. The problem is that there is a bias in the study because the people who were vaccinated were very different from those who weren't. Not being able to explain this 70%-something effectiveness in the first two weeks following vaccination in terms of de

Health committee  That's an excellent question. The modelling has shown us that the ideal interval would be six months if we wanted to have the most gain in terms of decrease in hospitalizations for Canadians. However, when we looked at six months and the supplies that we were going to have, we w

Health committee  It was based on vaccine delivery and mathematical modelling.

Health committee  There is a basis of science, but you're right that four months—and not four and a half or five—was based on procurements.

Health committee  The thing is that we looked at a six-month interval but didn't think we would need to go up to six months. You can look at the literature. Very renowned vaccinologists, such as Stanley Plotkin in the U.S., are also recommending delaying the second dose for as long as needed to gi