Bill Gates Calls For Global Cooperation To Vaccinate 7 Billion People

Karamchand Rameshwar - Apr 23, 2020

Bill Gates also confirmed that he will invest in building factories for 7 potential COVID-19 vaccines to accelerate the development by a few months.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - the largest private foundation in the world has just launched a call for global cooperation to get ready for the COVID-19 vaccine for 7 billion people while spending an additional $150 million on developing treatments and therapeutics for the coronavirus.

According to Mark Suzman, executive director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, although it can take up to 18 months to research and test the COVID-19 vaccine, global authorities and businesses need to have plans for production from now on.

Bill Gates Billions Covid 19 Vaccines — Mark Suzman, executive director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“It’s normal to have, at maximum, hundreds of millions of doses manufactured,” Suzman said. “When you are dealing with a novel pathogen like COVID-19, as and when we get to identifying a successful vaccine, we are going to need billions of doses. There are seven billion people on the planet. We are going to need to vaccinate nearly everyone. There is no manufacturing capacity to do that.”

After spending $100 million in February, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation continued to fund an additional $150 million for international efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, including pushing the development of the diagnostic tests as well as find effective treatments and vaccines.

In addition, the above funds will also be used for helping poor countries in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. These are countries that are extremely in need of physical equipment as well as medical infrastructure to combat COVID-19.

Bill Gates Billions Covid 19 Vaccines 2 — There have been about 100 different vaccines being researched and developed around the world.

However, the main focus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is still the research of an effective vaccine to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Currently, there are about 100 different types of vaccines being researched and developed around the world, according to Suzman. Although it is showing very positive results in small-scale trials, many of these vaccines may fail at extensive testing.

“A successful vaccine has to be available for seven billion people. You need to test if there are unexpected side effects, or side effects within cohorts or groups, whether it’s pregnant women or the elderly or the very young. The vast majority of vaccine candidates fail in those larger trials, the so-called phase-three trials,” said Suzman.

Bill Gates Billions Covid 19 Vaccines 3 — Earlier, Bill Gates himself had confirmed that he would try to invest in building manufacturing plants for 7 potential COVID-19 vaccines - a project that could cost billions of dollars since there will be only two factories selected to go into operation.

As Gates explained, he did not want to waste time figuring out which vaccines were really effective before building factories to produce them. Moreover, building factories for all seven potential vaccines could save months and potentially save trillions of dollars from being lost economically.

"Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don't waste time in serially saying, 'OK, which vaccine works?' and then building the factory," Gate said.

He also said that the construction of the factories should start very soon while the vaccines are still under development because that's what needed to get the fastest vaccines. We can not wait for someone to successfully develop a vaccine then build a factory for it.

In the best scenario, Gates believes that we could have a vaccine for COVID-19 in 12 to 18 months.

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