India’s research and manufacturing will be critical to fighting Covid-19, especially to making vaccines on a large scale, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said on Monday.
Addressing the 2020 Grand Challenges Annual Meeting, Gates delved into difficulties in vaccine development and Covid-19 diagnosis.
The American business mogul called India “very inspiring” as it has made great strides in improving the health of its people over the past two decades. “And now, research and manufacturing in India will be critical to fighting Covid-19, especially when it comes to making vaccines on a large scale,” he said.
Gates said scientists around the world are involved in one “great challenge” in particular: ending the current pandemic.
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He said researchers are breaking silos and instead of waiting to go through the publishing process, they are sharing data on a daily basis. “Since the pandemic began, scientists have shared 1.37,000 viral genomic sequences of Covid-19,” said the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. Even pharmaceutical companies are cooperating in forms of production that have never really been seen before, he added.
Speaking of the challenges in vaccine development, he said the mRNA vaccine is an area where many have seen “great promise.”
“Probably the first approved vaccine for Covid-19 will be mRNA,” he said, but added that you cannot count on the vaccine alone because it is very difficult to scale and has a logistical problem because it requires an adequate cold chain.
Gates expressed hope that the mRNA platform will mature in the next few years so that his vaccines can be scaled up and reduce costs and the requirement of the cold chain.
He also highlighted the need for innovation in diagnostic platforms. “Even when people are sometimes tested, the results are negative because some of the tests are not sensitive to the little nano virus,” he said, adding that this also leads to infection.
“So the diagnoses are letting us down,” Gates said, emphasizing the asymptomatic nature of the infection. “Right now, the current business model is identifying people with symptoms and we need to change that. We need sensitive and specific diagnostic tests that are important and we must facilitate their access, ”he said.
He also said that although the RT-PCR test has high specificity, many challenges are logistics. Gates suggested that there should be test kits that can be distributed in the community and stored in medicine cabinets, community centers and pharmacies.
On the cooperation of the scientific fraternity, he noted that international teams of scientists are collaborating at full speed on clinical trials of vaccines.
“One or more of these vaccines will be available early next year and since there will be multiple vaccines, you need to make sure you understand exactly how and where to use each one,” he said.
Gates said the pace of science in fighting the pandemic has been remarkable. “But despite all this work, right now, as fast as science has advanced … the pandemic is still ahead of us. The first Covid-19 vaccine will likely be the fastest that humans have gone from identifying the new disease to being able to immunize myself against it, ”he said. “Still, we all know that this virus has managed to plunge the entire world economy into a deep recession,” he added.
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