Coronavirus vaccine: it can be done in a year and a half, says Bill Gates

Bill Gates, an American billionaire and philanthropist, said the coronavirus vaccine could be ready in a year and a half, but the world might have to soften its usual safety screening procedures for mass production.

“Compromises will be needed,” Gates said. – We will have fewer security checks compared to the usual situation. In addition, governments will have to decide whether to exempt companies from responsibility and tell them: “Go ahead, do it!” – in a situation where we simply do not have time to do everything according to the usual rules. ”

In mid-March, it was reported that scientists had already developed several vaccine variants against COVID-19 and were now testing them on animals. If the tests are successful, the next step – human tests – may begin as early as this year.

The efforts of scientists are complicated by the fact that several varieties of coronavirus can exist in the world at once.

Meanwhile, a leading British coronavirus scientist, Wellcome Trust spokesman Jeremy Farrar, said vaccine development would be complicated by the fact that tests of some people who had already had COVID-19 showed the virus for the second time.

According to him, this happened with almost 100 patients in South Korea, and scientists do not yet understand whether this means that the virus remains active in the blood, or whether these people are re-infected.

Microsoft founder’s charity fund is among those who finance the development of a vaccine against COVID-19. According to Gates, only vaccination will return to the lifestyle that existed before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Bad marks”
Bill Gates, who had long warned of a possible global pandemic, also said that insufficient funds were allocated to develop a new vaccine, although the fight against a new coronavirus was already compared to war, and much more substantial money was spent on safety.

“There was a time when both I and the medical experts said that a pandemic could be the biggest disaster that humanity has ever experienced,” Gates said. – Back in 2015, I talked about this threat, speaking in New England. So, no doubt, we will all look into the past and regret that we did not invest enough funds so that we would be able to make a diagnosis as soon as possible, so that we had the necessary medicines, vaccines and equipment. ”

“We have all been underfunded against epidemics. Yes, we created the Epidemic Preparedness Innovation Coalition (CEPI), which helped develop new vaccines. But that’s only about 5% of what we could do, ”says Gates.

“Over time, we will look at all this, and very few countries will receive an excellent rating, because most are simply trying to react to what is happening, we were not ready for this,” the founder of the company said. – No one was preparing for this, not trying to think about what could happen. As a result, we found ourselves in uncharted territory in terms of healthcare and economic policy. ”

In mid-March, it was reported that the first volunteer coronavirus vaccine trials had begun in the United States. The development of this vaccine is funded by the US National Institute of Health.

However, experts also predicted that even if these trials were successful, another half year could pass before the vaccine became publicly available.