The Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced on April 2nd that his philanthropic foundation would be funding the construction of seven new coronavirus vaccine factories. He elaborated on the initiative to host Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” (online version). He said that his Gates Foundation could mobilize faster than governments to fight the coronavirus outbreak at the moment.
Gates said:
Because our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we’ve thought about the epidemic, we did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort. Our early money can accelerate things.
The foundation will end up picking only one or two of the vaccine candidates but will have all the factories built nonetheless to save time.
Gates said:
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. Simultaneously testing and building manufacturing capacity is essential to the quick development of a vaccine.
The problem is that each vaccine requires unique equipment, so they have to build each candidate its own factory. It will result in billions of dollars wasted. However, the world currently faces losing trillions of dollars to the economy, so “wasting a few billion to help is worth it,” he said.
It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this, the situation we’re in, where there are trillions of dollars … being lost economically, it is worth it. [The Gates Foundation] can get that bootstrapped and get it going and save months because every month counts.
He wrote in a Washington Post article:
To bring the disease to an end, we’ll need a safe and effective vaccine. If we do everything right, we could have one in less than 18 months — about the fastest a vaccine has ever been developed. But creating a vaccine is only half the battle. To protect Americans and people around the world, we’ll need to manufacture billions of doses. (Without a vaccine, developing countries are at even higher risk than wealthy ones, because it’s even harder for them to do physical distancing and shutdowns.)
He also urged the government to enforce stricter nationwide lockdown measures and estimated that the country would need another ten weeks of closures to deal with the crisis effectively.
Before this announcement of the vaccine manufacturing plants, he and his wife Melinda Gates pledged $100 million toward efforts fighting the coronavirus pandemic, including an initiative to send at-home coronavirus test kits to citizens in Washington state. Also, the Gates Foundation donated $3.7 million to COVID-19 relief efforts.
