Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation co-chair Bill Gates on Thursday said India’s work on design, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines helped saved a massive number of lives.
In conversation with Industries and IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao at BioAsia, the co-founder of tech giant Microsoft said two aspects of India’s work that stood out were development of “great vaccines with global partners, including the Gates Foundation, and getting those vaccines out.” India’s vaccine coverage is very impressive even better than most rich countries. That’s quite phenomenal, he said.
On the biggest learning from the pandemic, Mr. Gates said the speed with which “we responded was not as fast as would have been ideal. Getting diagnostic capacity and ability to quarantine people when the level of infection was still very low, only a few countries did that, like Australia.” On the other hand, “miraculous things [too] happened such as development of the vaccines, which was really incredible and the speed of response for even basic things like increasing the oxygen capacity,” he said.
