Gates on Friday said he and his foundation would spend $150 million to distribute vaccines, if they are found, to some of the world’s poorest people. It’s one of the largest financial commitments for coronavirus response to date from Gates, the world’s second-richest person. The Gates Foundation is handing the money to
the Serum Institute, the largest manufacturer of vaccines globally by volume, to produce 100 million doses that would cost at most just $3 each.
Gates has been among the foremost leaders on vaccine production over the last two decades, spending $4 billion on the global vaccine development effort known as Gavi. And for months, the billionaire has expressed profound worries that while rich countries may fare okay at surviving the coronavirus, the pandemic will devastate poor countries that can’t afford to administer the treatment, whenever it arrives.
“We’re trying to make sure we can end it not just in the rich countries,” Gates
said in an interview with Bloomberg this week, stressing that he is focusing on the vaccines in development that would be affordable in the developing world, such as those being pursued by the pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Novavax. “Those are the ones most scalable and low-cost.”
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The Gates Foundation has now pledged about $500 million in total to respond to the pandemic, though the $150 million announced on Friday is technically an interest-free forgivable loan. Most of that $500 million is focused on this nuts-and-bolts work of vaccine expansion.
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Working in Gates’s favor is that his foundation has a lot of experience in distributing cheap vaccines around the globe.
Gates has put more than $4 billion over the last two decades into Gavi, which is estimated by the Gates Foundation to have immunized 750 million children and saved 13 million lives.
Prior to Friday’s announcement, Gates had committed $100 million to Gavi specifically to buy and deliver a Covid-19 vaccine. In June, Gates had promised to send $1.6 billion to Gavi over the next five years for its broader vaccine work.