‘For the next pandemic, we'll have gigantic mRNA factories in India'

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, says the Delta variant will make it difficult for the world to end the pandemic by 2022, missing his last year’s estimate. In a telephone interview to TOI’s Surojit Gupta, Gates spoke on a range of issues, from vaccinating the elderly to creating factory capacities large enough to supply vaccines for the entire world within 200 days. Excerpts:

- Surojit Gupta

Last year, you talked about the possibility of ending the coronavirus pandemic by 2022. Do you still think it’s possible?

Everyone has been surprised by the Delta variant and how transmissive it is. India was the first place where there was, tragically, explosive growth in cases. The number of cases has come down from that peak, but we have to get these vaccines out far more broadly than we have done so far.

The foundation is very proud that back in the spring of 2020 we got the $300 million to Serum (Institute of India). The serum has executed very well on ramping up the volume, making record numbers of vaccines. Now, we wish we’d have even more, but in the months ahead the numbers are going to go up quite a bit. Novavax will come into the picture. We’ll have Johnson & Johnson. We’ll figure out what can be done with the booster. We’re not quite sure about that right now, but that’s probably beneficial as we get into 2022.

I’d say Delta was the worst variant that anyone ever expected, and so we probably will have cases into part of 2022, and the importance of getting the vaccine coverage up, very high, is even more clear now. My prediction, based on Delta, is that we’ll miss that goal somewhat.

In this year’s Goalkeepers Report you highlight the innovations that Covid-19 has triggered. Which are the ones that hold potential?

Now that the world understands its vulnerability to a pandemic, there will be a huge amount of research and the invention of new tools. The diagnostics — we could scale that up much faster. The therapeutics we could do a lot better. We should have a goal that we have so much factory capacity that, even within 200 days, we could make enough vaccines for the entire world.