“If they are successful in their phase three, which is still underway, we want to be able to increase that manufacturing capacity,” Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation told TOI in a Skype interview.
Gates said that India will play an important role in manufacturing these vaccines in large quantities, as several vaccine companies in the country have the ability to increase production.
“And of course India has a very important role to play in that. Because the world’s largest volume vaccine manufacturers, who have done a fantastic job and partnered with us on many of these life-saving vaccines, such as Serum, BioE, Bharat (Biotech), have the capacity. We have been in many discussions with companies, with vaccines that appear to be inexpensive and highly scalable, including AstraZeneca, Novavax – Sanofi – and Johnson and Johnson, ”Gates said.
He said that progress in reducing poverty around the world would be delayed by a few years due to the pandemic and that if all countries cooperate and the world is lucky enough to have good vaccines, health systems could recover quickly.
“If we do a brilliant job, we will end the pandemic in 2022; If we are lucky enough to have a lot of good vaccines that are manufactured in large numbers, I am sure that the healthcare system should be able to recover fairly quickly.
“We will have to catch up on the vaccination. But the economic damage, particularly in countries that were unable to borrow huge additional sums, such as some of the rich countries, will have major setbacks. … Some things of the extreme poverty type could take us five to ten years to get back to where we were in early 2020, ”Gates said.
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