Bill Gates: "COVID-19, forget the poorest countries, this trap that threatens the rich countries"

Bill Gates is the Co-Chairman of the Bill & Melina Gates Foundation.

The world is on the cusp of a scientific feat: A safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine will likely be ready by early next year.

There will probably actually be more than one vaccine available.

This discovery will finally allow the world to eliminate the threat of the pandemic and return to normalcy.

As the population can be immune to the disease, governments will be able to lift social distancing measures.

The mask will no longer be compulsory.

The world economy will be able to recover at full speed.

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But the disease will not go away on its own.

To achieve this goal, the world first needs three things: the ability to produce billions of doses of vaccine, the funds to purchase them, and the systems to deliver them.

The ability to manufacture vaccines

Currently, rich countries have captured most of the global supply of COVID-19 vaccines.

These countries have made agreements with pharmaceutical companies to be the first to buy billions of doses as soon as they are produced.

But what about low and middle income countries, countries like South Sudan, Nicaragua or Burma?

These countries represent almost half of the world's population and lack the purchasing power to negotiate large contracts with these laboratories.

As it stands, they will be able to cover, at best, 14% of their population.

These countries represent almost half of the world's population and do not have the purchasing power to negotiate large contracts with these laboratories.

New modeling from Northeastern University sheds light on the consequences of inequitable vaccine distribution.

The researchers looked at two different scenarios.

In the first, vaccines are distributed to countries according to the size of their populations.

The second scenario is closer to what is happening now: 50 rich countries receive the first two billion doses of vaccine.

In this scenario, the virus continues to spread freely for four months in three quarters of the world.

And almost twice as many people die.

It would be a bitter moral failure.

COVID-19 can be prevented with a vaccine, and no one should die from a preventable disease just because the country they live in cannot afford a production deal.

Without even worrying about equity, it is obvious that the scenario “first of the rich countries” poses problem.

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With this scenario, we would all end up in the situation of Australia and New Zealand.

For a long time, these two countries had to deplore few cases inside their borders, but still experienced an economic slowdown, because their trading partners were confined.

And sometimes a new carrier of the virus crosses the Pacific and creates a new source of contamination.

These foci develop and spread.

Schools and offices have to close again.

Even with plenty of vaccines, rich countries risk being contaminated again in this way, because not everyone will necessarily choose to be vaccinated.

In order for this disease to no longer pose a threat to anyone, it must be eliminated everywhere.

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Pointing the finger at the behavior of rich countries will not bridge this vaccination gap.

Their attitude is perfectly understandable: they seek to protect their population.

The best thing to do is to dramatically increase vaccine production capacity around the world.

So everyone can be covered, regardless of the region.

COVID-19 can be prevented with a vaccine, and no one should die from a preventable disease just because the country they live in cannot afford a production deal

Remarkable progress has already been made on this point in terms of treatments.

Pharmaceutical companies have agreed to increase drug production capacity by using other people's factories.

Remdesivir, for example, was created by Gilead, but additional inventory will now be produced at Pfizer factories.

No company has ever allowed its factories to be used by a competitor in this way, and today we are seeing similar cooperation for vaccines.

This morning, 16 pharmaceutical companies and our foundation signed an important agreement.

The companies agreed, among other things, to cooperate in vaccine manufacturing and to increase production at an unprecedented rate, ensuring that approved vaccines were distributed widely and as quickly as possible.

Funds to pay for vaccines

In addition to the production capacity to make them, we also need funds to pay for billions of doses of vaccines for poor countries.

This is where the ACT Accelerator comes in. The ACT Accelerator is an initiative supported by organizations such as Gavi and the Global Fund.

Few have heard of it, but over the past two decades, these organizations have become experts in funding vaccines, drugs and diagnostics.

Pharmaceutical companies have made the funding easier, foregoing profits on any COVID-19 vaccine and agreeing to make it as affordable as possible.

But public funding is also necessary.

Pharmaceutical companies have made funding easier, foregoing profits on any COVID-19 vaccine and agreeing to make it as affordable as possible

The UK decision is a good example for other rich countries to follow.

The country donated enough money for the accelerator to purchase, possibly, hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine for poor countries.

I hope other countries will be generous too.

President Macron also played a leading role in the creation of the ACT accelerator.

And I know that the French government is strongly mobilized to make the Paris Peace Forum in November another time to celebrate multilateralism, including the success of the accelerator, while ensuring that its work is fully funded. .

The system for delivering vaccines

Finally, even when the world has the production capacity and the necessary funds, we will need to strengthen health systems: the agents and infrastructure that can actually deliver vaccines to people around the world.

There is much we can learn from the current efforts to eradicate polio.

One of the most famous photos of India's polio eradication effort showed a line of health workers.

The latter were crossing a flooded area, a cooler full of vaccines on their heads, to reach an isolated village.

Spotting cases of COVID-19 in the poorest regions of the world will require the same network of primary health workers;

a network capable of reaching places to which no road leads.

With the right diagnoses, these agents can also sound the alarm if another disease passes from a bat, or bird, to a human.

Pandemics are rare events where a country's instinct to protect itself is perfectly aligned with its instinct to help others.

In other words, by eliminating COVID-19, we can also build the system that will help reduce the impact of the next pandemic.

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If there's one thing I've learned from studying the history of pandemics, it's that they create a surprising dynamic in terms of self-interest and altruism: pandemics are rare events where instinct of a country to protect itself is perfectly aligned with its instinct to help others.

Ensuring that poor countries have access to vaccines is in everyone's interest.