American philanthropist Bill Gates has said that India’s research and manufacturing will play important role in fight against coronavirus. He also underlined that India will play a crucial role in making vaccines on a large scale.
Addressing the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting 2020, Gates said that India is very inspiring as it has focused in imporving its health sector immensly in the last two decades.
“And now, India’s research and manufacturing will be critical to fighting COVID-19 especially when it comes to making vaccines at large scale,” he said. Gates said scientists all over the world are involved in a particular ‘grand challenge’ – ending the current pandemic. He said researchers are breaking down silos and rather than waiting to go through the publication process, they are sharing data on a daily basis.
“Since the pandemic began, scientists have shared 1,37,000 viral COVID-19 genomic sequences,” the Microsoft Corp co-founder said.
The billionaire focusing on the process of vaccine development said that he mRNA vaccine is an area where progress has been made. He said that the vaccine alone can not suffice to control the spread of virus as there would be many logistical problems. He further expressed hope that mRNA platforms will scale up vaccine production as well as bring down the costs.
. “Even when sometimes people are tested, results come back negative because some of the tests are not sensitive to the small nano virus,” he said, adding, this also leads to infection. “So, the diagnostics are letting us down,” Gates said, stressing on the asymptomatic nature of the infection.
“Right now, the current business model is identifying people with symptoms and we need to change that. We need sensitive and specific diagnostic tests which matter and we need to make it easy to access,” he said. He also said although the RT-PCR test has high specificity, a lot of challenge is about the logistics. Gates suggested that there should be test kits that can be spread out into the community and can be stocked in medicine cabinets, community centres and pharmacies.
On cooperation by the scientific fraternity, he noted that international teams of scientists are collaborating with full speed on the vaccine clinical trials. “One or more of these vaccines will be available by early next year and as there will be multiples vaccines, it is necessary to make sure to understand how exactly and where to use each of them,” he said.
