Many people pay attention to all the statements made by Bill Gates, America’s billionaire cum conscience in the coronavirus era, about the United States’ response to the pandemic. But much less attention is being paid to what Gates’ fortune is actually going into: stealing the rest of the world for the coronavirus vaccine they will need next year.
Gates said on Friday that he and his foundation would spend $ 150 million to distribute faxes, if found, to some of the world’s poorest people. It is one of the largest financial commitments to respond to coronavirus to date from Gates, the second richest person in the world. The Gates Foundation is donating the money to the Serum Institute, the largest manufacturer of vaccines worldwide by volume, to produce 100 million doses that would cost a maximum of $ 3 each.
Gates has been one of the leading leaders in fax production for the past two decades, spending $ 4 billion on the global fax development effort known as Gavi. And for months, the billionaire has expressed great concern that although rich countries may feel in order in surviving the coronavirus, the pandemic will destroy poor countries that cannot afford the treatment when it arrives.
“We’re trying to make sure we can not just end it in rich countries,” Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg this week, stressing that he is focusing on the faxes in development that would be affordable in the development world, such as those pursued by the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Novavax. “Those are the ones that are most scalable and low.”
What Gates is essentially doing is deploying his bank accounts to set a “ceiling price” for the faxes developed by these two companies. Serum is preparing to produce these vaccines for India, where Serum is based, and up to 91 other countries in poor and middle-income countries.
The Gates Foundation now owes a total of about $ 500 million to respond to the pandemic, although the $ 150 million announced on Friday is technically an interest-free forgivable loan. Most of that $ 500 million is concentrated on this work of fax expansion nuts and bolts.
Part of the foundation’s plan to stimulate the world depends on which vaccine ends up proving to be the most successful in protecting us from the disease. Twenty-eight different possible vaccines have been advanced to human subjects, each with different manufacturing costs and requiring different materials and accuracy. Some of the leading candidates for vaccines, such as those followed by Moderna and Pfizer, are likely to be more expensive to produce because they are RNA vaccines that are fundamentally more expensive.
“Because of the way you produce them, and the difficulty of scaling them up, they are more likely – if they are useful – to help in rich countries. They will not be the cheap, scalable solution for the whole world, ”Gates said in an interview with WIRED.
Then there is the profit margin. The fax industry has a duty to keep its own profits from Covid-19 vaccines low, although not necessarily to sell the doses at cost.
That Gates’ influence depends on what happens in the research labs. If the cheaper vaccines – such as those produced by Serum – are the ones that prove the strongest, then it will be easier and cheaper to protect people in poor countries. Gates is already working with other vaccine researchers – such as Johnson & Johnson, which also strives for low-vaccine – to secure doses for the developing world.
Working in Gates ’favor is that his foundation has a lot of experience in spreading cheap faxes all over the world. Gates has invested more than $ 4 billion in Gavi over the past two decades, which is estimated by the Gates Foundation to immunize 750 million children and save 13 million lives.
Prior to Friday’s announcement, Gates had allocated $ 100 million to Gavi specifically to purchase and deliver a Covid-19 vaccine. In June, Gates promised to send $ 1.6 billion to Gavi over the next five years for its broader fax business.
So while Gates cannot control how much the vaccine costs, he brings enormous credibility and a track record of his billions to work to distribute it as cheaply as possible and through a proven supply chain.
The other thing Gates can control is his voice. And although he has been a heavy presence on the interview circle since the very beginning of the US pandemic in March, he has renewed his efforts in recent days and has appeared everywhere.
His message? The US government must not only think of Americans. That Gates is pressuring lawmakers in the upcoming relief bill to make more money for Gavi and not push for “vaccination nationalism.”
“I’ve talked to Pence, I’ve talked to Mnuchin, Pompeo – in particular the issue of ‘Has the US come up in terms of providing money to get the vaccine for the developing world?'” He told Wired. “There have been a lot of meetings, but we have not been able to see the US.”
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