Nowadays, everyone is working every fiber of their being to make sure that a vaccine for the highly dangerous virus at this moment that is Covid-19 could be produced and finally can be used worldwide to end this dreading pandemic situation. Many parties such as scientists, laboratory workers, and others are working hand in hand to come up with the vaccine.
Other than all these important parties, there is also one particular person who takes this effort seriously and that person is Bill Gates. Bill Gates has been involved with the finding of vaccine for Covid-19 since the coronavirus outbreak and he involved more than any other philanthropist. He even has reached the point where he would found himself caught up in the middle of conspiracy theories that he actually planted the virus himself for his own evil purposes.
More than $350 million has been pledged by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the development of the vaccine at several pharma companies such as Novavax, AstraZeneca, and also Johnson & Johnson. Even most of the individuals in the medical community have agreed to test the first batch of vaccine by the end of this year, Bill Gates warned them that the vaccine might not be powerful enough to solve all the serious problems at one go.
“The initial vaccine won’t be ideal in terms of its effectiveness against sickness and transmission,” Gates said in a new interview with Bloomberg. “It may not have a long duration, and it will mainly be used in rich countries as a stopgap measure.”
The positive point of view that can be taken in this situation would be the vaccine would be widely available and the effective vaccines will likely arrive next year when multiple vaccines get approved and the manufacturing process ramps up. “With so many companies working on it, we can afford quite a few failures and still have something with low cost and long duration,” Gates added.
A handful of vaccine candidates such as AstraZeneca’s AZD1222 and Moderna’s mRNA-1273, have started final human trials. Right now, the U.S. and a few European countries are racing to seal deals with vaccine developers, committing to purchase hundreds of millions of doses even though their vaccines haven’t been proven safe and effective.
“Every call I’m on with the pharma leaders and the leaders of countries is with the goal of, ‘Hey, we need everybody to be protected,’” Gates said. “We’ve funded more research and development than any country, but on factories and procurement, we’ve only taken care of ourselves.” “The innovations in therapeutics will start to cut the death rate, but the true end will come from the spread of natural infections and the vaccine giving us herd immunity,” he added. “For rich countries, that will be sometime next year, ideally in the first half.”
Sources: Observer