December 21, 2020
Yahoo Finance – During an appearance at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in October, Bill Gates had a prediction.
He said the coronavirus stimulus negotiations would be “the best opportunity” to get funding approved to help the poorest people in the world get vaccinated.
“The people in the Congress who support these things have decided that [the stimulus bill] is the most likely way for something to get done,” Gates said.
That insight from the Microsoft (MSFT) co-founder has apparently come true.
As part of the announcement Sunday evening of a $900 billion coronavirus relief deal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer touted “an additional $3.36 billion for a total of $4 billion for GAVI, the international vaccine alliance.”
The Democratic leaders said the money recognizes that “we are not truly safe until the whole world is safe from the coronavirus.”
Gavi, a public-private health partnership, and a similar organization called the Global Fund have “spent two decades becoming experts in the task of financing vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics,” Gates recently wrote.
During a separate recent interview with Yahoo Finance, Melinda Gates recently discussed the effort to get more funding for Gavi, saying it has a whole distribution system in place to get the vaccine out.
“It’s totally possible,” she said, “you just have to do the planning now.”
The alliance was founded in 2000 with a mission of making all vaccines more widely available.
Gavi says it has vaccinated 822 million children over its two decades in operation and will be central in getting the coronavirus vaccine to the poorest corners of the globe in the coming year …
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