Gates pledges billions to find coronavirus vaccine
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has said he is willing to ‘‘waste’’ billions of dollars to build factories to manufacture and test seven possible coronavirus vaccines.
The billionaire philanthropist said that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s plan was essential to build the manufacturing capacity required and ensure a proven vaccine is developed and in production within 18 months.
‘‘Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven just so we don’t waste time in serially saying ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,’’ Gates told the American TV programme The Daily Show.
‘‘It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars . . . being lost economically, it is worth it.’’
He warned that social distancing measures would have to stay in force until ‘‘we get the world vaccinated’’, meaning that the capacity to manufacture a vaccine had to be established at the same time as it was developed.
Gates’s net worth is estimated by Forbes to be US$100 billion (NZ$176b). He has donated more than US$35 billion of Microsoft stock to the foundation he chairs with his wife.
Last week, Gates, 64, called for the US to enforce a nationwide shut-down. While there are social distancing guidelines issued by the federal government, binding restrictions are determined and enforced by the states.
‘‘We need a consistent nationwide approach to shutting down,’’ Gates wrote in The Washington Post. ‘‘Some states and counties haven’t shut down completely . . . this is a recipe for disaster. Because people can travel freely across state lines, so can the virus.
‘‘The country’s leaders need to be clear: shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere.’’
He also warned that the challenge of developing a vaccine was complicated by the fact that ‘‘many of the top candidates are made using unique equipment’’, requiring countries to ‘‘build facilities for each of them, knowing that some won’t get used.’’