“India’s research and manufacturing will be critical to fighting Covid-19 especially when it comes to making vaccines at large scale,” said billionaire & philanthropist Bill Gates at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting 2020 on Monday.
The virtual event is being co-hosted by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and goes on till October 21. PM Modi also addressed the participants on Monday.
Gates called India “very inspiring” and said that in the last two decades several actions have been taken by the government to improve the quality of people’s health. He said India’s part in fighting Covid-19 and making vaccines is huge.
Talking about vaccines he said “probably, the first approved vaccine for Covid-19 will be mRNA.”… “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”
“The first Covid-19 vaccine will probably be the fastest that humans have ever gone from identifying the new disease to be able to immunise against it,” he said.
He said at different occasions, the tests to identify presence of the virus don’t give out the right/precise results – “Even when sometimes people are tested, results come back negative because some of the tests are not sensitive to the small nano virus,”
“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.