Foreign Affairs committee  We all agree that this is a multi-faceted problem that requires multiple interventions. The TRIPS waiver is only one among them.

Foreign Affairs committee  To me, the biggest obstacle was that the richest nations essentially cornered all of the vaccine supply last year. There was virtually nothing available for low- and middle-income countries. COVAX donations came down to a trickle. The world just sat by and allowed this virus to r

Foreign Affairs committee  You would need to give me more than 60 seconds to give you the list. My point is that we need structural changes, and we need money and then—

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, I'm trying. Like I said, there are structural changes that prevented low-income countries from getting supply. Now that there is a supply, they are struggling to vaccinate because they don't have the resources to deliver them. We need to fix both. We need a short, predict

Foreign Affairs committee  Firstly, you're right. There are lots of things that went wrong in India, and I wrote a whole article on it in The Washington Post. For sure, there were missteps, but when the delta wave emerged in India, only 10% of India was vaccinated. Essentially, this deadly little strain of

Foreign Affairs committee  How can it not be a global crisis? Every month, millions of people are affected by this crisis. I'll just give you India as an example. In just three months, April, May and June of last year, 2.7 million Indians died. That is almost a million deaths a month. That is how devastat

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, sir. Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on this particular issue of how tobacco company involvement is seen or not. Like I said, I do not think the WHO would do this only to one company. This is their policy and they're probably applying it to all companies regardless o

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm guessing that the WHO and UN agencies have to walk a tight line here, because tobacco company involvement has been proven to be challenging for them across the disease areas. For them, I think it's not just a COVID issue but probably a system-wide policy to not engage with to

Foreign Affairs committee  The answer is a resounding no. Given the selfishness, greed and myopia of the world's richest countries that we have seen, the naked display of that in the last two years, I'm one hundred per cent convinced that in the next crisis we will behave the exact same way. We will go nat

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, ma'am, and happy birthday. Yes, I did a whole segment for CTV News, along with Dr. Joanne Liu and Dr. Richard Gold, which was telecast last week, where I said that the most selfish thing that we could do is to help vaccinate the world. The rationale is very simple.

Foreign Affairs committee  Go ahead, Marc-André. I will go after you.

Foreign Affairs committee  The WHO just published an excess death report last week, and their estimate is closer to 15 million than six million. I think everybody in the world agrees that everybody is undercounting the number of COVID-19 deaths. The reality is somewhere around 15 million.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, sir. I am pretty sure.... I'm not an expert in tobacco, but the tobacco regulation that all UN agencies have to comply with is very old. It wasn't developed just around COVID. In other words, if anyone would have done their due diligence, they should have picked up th

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I would like to make my remarks about the critical importance of self-sufficiency in vaccine production in all cases. Firstly, I want to acknowledge that last year, around this time, I was very lucky to get my vaccine shot here