Bill Gates hopes his coronavirus vaccine ‘manufacturing within a year’
- World’s second-richest man warned of ‘exponential’ growth in Covid-19 cases from a rushed reopening of US economy
- Gates, who warned the world in 2015 about a coming pandemic, defended the WHO from criticism
Billionaire Bill Gates is funding production of the seven most promising ideas for a vaccine as he refocuses his philanthropic work on the deadly coronavirus.
“If everything went perfectly, we’d be in scale manufacturing within a year,” Gates said on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS. “It could be as long as two years.”
The world’s second-richest man said vaccine production will probably not start in September, as some have said.
“Dr Fauci and I have been fairly consistent to say 18 months to create expectations that are not too high,” Gates said, referring to Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force.
The availability of testing for the coronavirus has been a sore spot in the US for months. President Donald Trump tweeted on Saturday that the US “just passed 5 million Tests, far more than any other country.”