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December 21, 2020 01:18 am

How the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Fought the Pandemic

In a long article titled "Gates versus the Pandemic," Fast Company looks at the many mitigation efforts launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. - It's one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. - It's partnered with the governments of Norway and India, the World Economic Forum, and the research-charity Wellcome Trust to launch an important group called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). And then Fast Company breaks down the specifics:- The Gates Foundation invested $52 million in a German mRNA startup named CureVac in 2015; a year later, it gave Massachusetts-based Moderna a $20 million grant to support its development of mRNA-based HIV therapeutics, which helped the company further its underlying platform that can also be used to make vaccines. - The foundation made an initial equity investment of $55 million in BioNTech, another German startup working on mRNA technology, in 2019. (While the foundation typically makes grants, it sometimes invests in companies to negotiate terms that require a funded product be globally accessible and affordable.) The goal of all of this spending, in part, was to encourage these companies to focus on mRNA vaccines for communicable illnesses. "If you're looking at where the money is," in medical funding, "it's in oncology and cancer immunotherapy," says Lynda Stuart, deputy director of vaccines and host-pathogen biology at the Gates Foundation. Without a push, companies working in the space "wouldn't necessarily gravitate to infectious disease vaccines." As the virus was beginning to spread, the Gates Foundation encouraged its other vaccine development partners to turn to COVID-19. - Researchers at Oxford University started work on a coronavirus vaccine made from a weakened, altered form of a chimpanzee cold virus, a platform that CEPI had supported for other vaccines such as MERS. - Novavax, a biotech startup the foundation had previously funded, also entered the race to create a vaccine. By October, more than 200 COVID-19 vaccines were in development, but only 11 had reached Phase III clinical trials (human efficacy tests, the last step before regulatory approval). Of those, four vaccine platforms — from Moderna, BioNTech, Novavax, and the University of Oxford — had received early backing from CEPI or the Gates Foundation. In November, BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca all announced that their respective vaccines had proved highly effective in preliminary study results. On December 11, the FDA approved the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, which represents a huge victory for the Gates Foundation. (In addition, the foundation is funding contenders that are at an earlier stage of development, such as Icosavax's nanoparticle vaccine construct.) "Without the efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Covid-19 crisis would almost certainly be worse," writes Fast Company. "But its extensive role raises questions about how much we rely on philanthropy." Their article includes this quote from a Northeastern University law professor focused on intellectual property rights and universal access to treatments for HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. "A fundamental question is, Well, because you have the money, should you be able to control the architecture of global health?" A former director of vaccine delivery at the Gates Foundation counters that "they add value in helping to design very effective programs."

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