Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-chair Bill Gates on Thursday said India’s work on design, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines helped saved a massive number of lives.
In conversation with Industries and IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao at BioAsia, the co-founder of tech giant Microsoft said two aspects of India’s work that stood out were development of “great vaccines with global partners, including the Gates Foundation, and getting those vaccines out.” India’s vaccine coverage is very impressive even better than most rich countries. That’s quite phenomenal, he said.
On the biggest learning from the pandemic, Mr. Gates said the speed with which “we responded was not as fast as would have been ideal. Getting diagnostic capacity and ability to quarantine people when the level of infection was still very low, only a few countries did that, like Australia.” On the other hand, “miraculous things [too] happened such as development of the vaccines, which was really incredible and the speed of response for even basic things like increasing the oxygen capacity,” he said.
The Foundation with its partners in India is pursuing a research agenda to use some of the new vaccine platforms, including mRNA, to create new capacity in the country and use them as standby for future pandemics as well as to get vaccines for difficult diseases such as HIV and TB. Also, he emphasised the need to enhance efforts on the diagnostics and therapeutics front and for the world to spend more on research and development.
When the Minister, pointing to a 2015 TED talk in which Mr. Gates had predicted a pandemic, asked what will be next big crisis, he said while the last gigantic pandemic was 100 years ago, the next one wouldn’t be that long. It is likely to be a respiratory virus, considering the amount of travel people undertake, with ability to spread rapidly. “I am actually doing a book... about making sure we are ready for next pandemic,” he said.
To a query on intersection of technology and health, Mr. Gates said it would be about digital tools for medical diagnosis at home as well as sensors and use of Artificial Intelligence to monitor health. The emphasis, he said, should be on making healthcare affordable. Inviting Mr.Gates to visit Telangana, Mr. Rao said, “You will see a very very different Hyderabad.”
