Health committee  Sure. I think it is important that Canada be a major contributor to both COVAX and other mechanisms for vaccines for the developing world. Until the U.S. came in I think we were the largest contributor per capita to the COVAX facility. But it's in our interest to make sure that

Health committee  Right now, the vaccines have not yet been approved for young people here in Canada. Again, I think there is a good argument, both a moral argument and a practical one, that the G7 countries, including Canada, donate vaccines to the developing world initially for frontline health

Health committee  Mr. Chair, it's complicated with COVAX. There are two pots of money or two bank accounts within COVAX. One is a donation that countries make, including Canada, to buy a vaccine for the developing world, and the other is for vaccines that they're entitled to withdraw for themselve

Health committee  Thank you for the question. I'm a fundamental scientist, not a vaccine manufacturer, so you'll understand when I say that it's really outside my own area of expertise. When we discussed that issue on the vaccine task force, I think the issues that came up pretty quickly were aro

Health committee  You'd have to ask the NRC about that. I think the issue is that at that point, the NRC had ended its partnership with CanSino, which is a viral vector vaccine along the same lines as the AstraZeneca vaccine. I think they were in discussions with AstraZeneca. I think you heard th

Health committee  We did not. Our primary concern was the quality of the science, whether the company and its partners were capable of doing the trials, and whether they were capable of scaling up. The procurement issues were all handled by the department of procurement,Minister Anand's group.

Health committee  We did not get into any of the details of the procurement arrangements. We simply recommended to ministers which vaccines should be purchased and which ones should go to the NRC for IRAP, as I indicated earlier. I think all of us—not just in Canada, but in the world—were surpris

Health committee  Absolutely. The end point for these trials would not be whether they're protective, which would take a long time and a lot of people in the trials. The end point could simply be how well the mix-and-match strategy elicits a very robust immuno-response relative to not using a mix-

Health committee  Mr. Chair, I'd have to look at exactly what those other two committees do to give you a complete answer. I would say that, when the Canadian vaccine task force got started, we were just swamped with the need to identify, as quickly as possible, those vaccine candidates that woul

Health committee  Yes, I've been quoted in an interview in the newspapers that I think mixing and matching has several advantages. One is for the viral vector vaccines like the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine. The second time you come in with the second shot, the host will have already, perhaps, mounte

Health committee  Typically in vaccine trials, teens and pregnant women are not included in the first instance because they represent a high-risk group. There's a concern that they not be exposed to a vaccine until it's been tested to be safe and effective by the regulator. However, as we speak, t

Health committee  The CanSino collaboration between the NRC and CanSino actually started before the vaccine task force was formed. When they came in front us it was partly an FYI but partly for us to comment on the science behind—

Health committee  There were two things. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that at that point, CanSino was actually way out in front of any vaccine developer in terms of having a vaccine for human use for COVID-19.

Health committee  The bad news was with the science in it. I can go as deep into it as you would like. Because it was an adenoviral vector, and we all have antibodies to the adenovirus type-5 vector that was used in the CanSino vaccine, there was a worry that there would be antibodies to the vecto

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you to all members of the committee for your time and interest in clearly what's a very important matter. My name is Alan Bernstein. I am president and CEO of CIFAR. We are a Canadian-based global research organization. I believe I have been called