Bill Gates determined to do all he can in fight against coronavirus
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Bill Gates, the Microsoft tycoon, has said the global coronavirus pandemic is his “worst nightmare”, and said he will fund the manufacture of several vaccines even prior to their being approved so they are ready to distribute as quickly as possible.
In an interview with The Times, the billionaire – whose charitable foundation is reportedly now the biggest funder of the World Health Organization – said that he had been concerned about the impact of a vial pandemic for years.
Gates told The Times the global health charity in his name will arrange funding to build factories to produce billions of doses of different potential vaccines, so it is ready to distribute around the world. In particular, he said, he was speaking to pharmaceutical companies about scaling up production of a vaccine under development at Oxford university, for which human trials have begun.
“The only thing that keeps me awake at night is the thought of a pandemic,” Bill Gates, the second richest man in the world, told us in an interview last February. “It’s been 100 years since we had a huge flu epidemic. People travel more today, so the speed of spread would be faster. If you had a respiratory transmitted disease, the numbers could be horrific.”
