Health committee  If I could take that, Mr. Chair, the initiatives that are being described are led out of the industry portfolio. They would be best positioned to answer those types of questions.

Health committee  Medicago is a private company.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, again, the biomanufacturing strategy that Canada is pursuing is led by the industry portfolio.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I have to clarify. It improves the global supply, ultimately. By “efficiency” I was not referring to the performance of the vaccine. That has no change whatsoever with moving from five to six. What does change is that the amount of vaccine that can be provided from a given production lot becomes increased.

Health committee  Just quickly, Mr. Chair, if I may, the specific syringes that improve your chances of succeeding with the six doses are being distributed with the doses as they go out currently. Also, the extensive training that has been made available to the health professionals across the country will be instrumental in helping them achieve that goal.

Health committee  It doesn't have a material impact on the speed of delivery, but it does allow more efficient use of the available vaccine supply globally.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, that would not be covered under the current agreements and would be covered by new negotiations.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, the current contracts that are in place do not reference the need for boosters. Those would be new conversations that we would enter into with the suppliers.

Health committee  We are engaged directly with the suppliers and keeping current with their tracking of vaccine performance and plans for boosters or updates to their vaccines. They currently do not have boosters that are available for distribution. It's going to be a while yet before that's in play, but the discussions with them are on a rolling basis.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, the vaccines we have, the two that are authorized, are the Moderna and the Pfizer, which have very strong efficacy against the Wuhan strain, the original strain. If they have an alteration in their efficacy as a result of variants and they lose some of their efficacy by 10% or 20%, or even a bit more, they still will be very useful tools and vaccines that you would want to deploy widely in your population.

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I would have to refer to experts to understand what that threshold is, and that would be a question of deployment. If the vaccines reach a state where the experts are advising that they shouldn't be deployed, then clearly they will follow that. The people who make the decisions to deploy the vaccine will make those alterations.