Bill Gates, whose foundation has focused efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, said Wednesday that government and industry leaders around the world need to “get serious" about increasing vaccine-making capacity so that they can respond faster in the future.
While changes to how the world allocates and shares doses can help, the ability to quickly make large volumes of mRNA vaccines can lessen the political tensions that can arise from scarcity, Gates wrote in his blog.
“The world should have the goal of being able to make and deliver enough vaccines for everyone on the planet within six months of detecting a potential pandemic," Gates said. “If we could do that, then the supply of doses would not be a limiting factor, and the way they were allocated would no longer be a matter of life and death."
Regional agencies, meanwhile, can help by working to create more “gold-standard" regulators that can approve vaccines, Gates said, noting that he doesn’t think that supply has been limited by intellectual protection rules.
This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.
