India’s manufacturing and research is critical to fighting COVID: Gates

NEW DELHI: Bill Gates, Co-Founder, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while talking about COVID-19 vaccine development, said that India’s research and manufacturing will be critical to fighting COVID-19, especially for making vaccines on a large scale. He said this while addressing the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting 2020 on Monday, October 19. He went on to say that the work done by India is ‘very inspiring’ and that the country has made huge strides in improving the health of its people in the last two decades.

Gates said that scientists all over the world are now working to end the pandemic as soon as possible. Scientists are now breaking down silos and instead of waiting for publications, they are sharing their results on a daily basis. “Since the pandemic began, scientists have shared 1,37,000 viral Covid-19 genomic sequences,” the Microsoft Corp co-founder said. Even the pharmaceutical companies are cooperating on production ways that really have never been seen before, he added.

“The first approved COVID vaccine will probably be mRNA,” he said but added that the world cannot rely on a single vaccine as it would be a logistical nightmare. Scaling up a single vaccine to suffice for the needs of everyone is impossible and therefore, simultaneous development of more vaccines is necessary.

He also stressed on the need for innovation in diagnostics platforms. “Even when sometimes people are tested, results come back negative because some of the tests are not sensitive to the small nano virus,” he said, adding, this also leads to infection. Diagnostics is what is slowing us down in our fight against COVID. This is mainly because of the asymptomatic nature of the virus. He said, “We need more sensitive and precise tests to efficiently diagnose the disease and the test must also be cost-effective and easily accessible to everyone.”

Gates said the pace of science in fighting the pandemic has been remarkable. “But despite all this work, right now, as fast as the science has moved, the pandemic is still ahead of us. The first Covid-19 vaccine will probably be the fastest that humans have ever gone from identifying the new disease to be able to immunise against it,” he said. “Still we all know this virus has managed to plunge the entire global economy into a deep recession,” he added.