Bill Gates worries about a ‘dysfunctional’ approach to Covid-19 vaccine distribution
Bill Gates fears a “dysfunctional” approach to distributing Covid-19 vaccines, he said Tuesday, despite an inspiring effort by biopharmaceutical companies to produce promising candidates with high measures of protection.
Developing apparently effective vaccines so quickly — especially exploiting a novel approach that uses mRNA to instruct cells to make viral proteins and trigger an immune response — has been “fantastic,” Gates said in conversation with Rick Berke, STAT’s co-founder and executive editor, during the 2020 STAT Summit. Despite worries about the speed with which companies moved to get there under perceived political pressure, he said “no corners were cut” by companies backed by Operation Warp Speed or by Pfizer, which developed a vaccine with a German partner without U.S. government funding.
