Health committee  For COVID, no, not yet, but papers were published for gastroenteritis vaccines.

Health committee  That's a broad question that I don't have the answer to. If I did, I would have said it by now. That said, my sense is that the Public Health Agency of Canada definitely has a role to play, and I think it's trying to do that. The fact remains, however, that, at the provincial level, data also belong to the provinces.

Health committee  What we all fear is that the second peak will hit quickly. If the lockdown isn't lifted in the right way, meaning, we follow the example of some of the southern states—Texas, Georgia and Alabama, where the number of cases has started to climb back up—and if people don't continue to wear masks and respect physical distancing guidelines, the number of cases could start rising again.

Health committee  In opposition to a regular randomized controlled trial, in which you would vaccinate a patient and wait for that person to be exposed to the disease to see whether the vaccine would be then protective, in a challenge trial you actually squirt the virus directly into the nose of a person who's been either vaccinated or not, to see if those who are vaccinated are more protected than those who are not.

Health committee  Are you asking how many have been done at this point in time?

Health committee  As far as I know, the tests are still being validated in the various labs, so testing has not started per se. I know that it is one of the priorities of the immunity task groups to know what is the prevalence in health care workers. I know that there was a group in B.C. that tested health care workers to look at that sort of prevalence, but across Canada, for something that's pan-Canadian, we don't have data yet.

Health committee  It is, I reassure you.

Health committee  Yes, I've seen it.

Health committee  Even though the epidemic seemed to have hit New York City pretty hard, I think the percentage of the prevalence wasn't that high. Again, if we're looking to reach 70%, it's not happening any time soon. Also, I think Canada is even further down, so we haven't seen anything yet and are still very much at risk for a second wave.

Health committee  Well, I can tell you that getting data is like pulling teeth out of a mouth, so we're delayed, because the data-sharing hasn't been easy. However, the goal of that study is to look at the differential response to a vaccine in males and females. Our basic hypothesis is that females will answer better and will have better immune response but may also have more adverse events in terms of local adverse events.

Health committee  When we look at the first data out, males seem to have more mortality than females, which could also mean that their immune response might not be as strong, but it's very early on. Because we don't have a good denominator, those proportions are always hard to interpret. It's something interesting to see.

Health committee  I guess I can start. As I said, I think one of the things that we see is that even surveillance definitions are not harmonized across the country, which makes data difficult to compare. If we could at least have an understanding of what we're talking about in terms of what a death due to COVID is, what's not a death, what a case is....

Health committee  Absolutely. As Dr. Tremblay said, it's hard to do it as we speak, but I think that, to promote long-term collaborations, building infrastructure today that will help us tomorrow to be able to collaborate is something that needs to be done. We have a tendency to try to come up with an infrastructure out of a hat when we need it, but that doesn't work.

Health committee  You know more than I do. I don't know about the intellectual property. I haven't looked at it.

Health committee  I don't know. Hopefully, but I don't know.