Donation By Bill Gates For Universal Flu Vaccine
Donation By Bill Gates For Universal Flu Vaccine: Bill Gates has announced a donation of $12 million for research on a modern-day pandemic. Speaking at the annual meeting for the Massachusetts Society of Medicine in Boston, Bill Gates stated, “to broaden efforts even further, today we are launching a $12 million Grand Challenge in partnership with the Page family to accelerate the development of a universal flu vaccine”.
Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill has given donation for a “transformational” flu vaccine after warning that the world is not ready to deal with a modern-day pandemic.
Back in 1889, the Russian flu became the first flu pandemic to spread across continents. A few decades later, the 1918 flu pandemic killed 675,000 people in just five weeks.
Today we have vaccines, drugs, and diagnostic tools that help us address outbreaks far more effectively than when those illnesses first took hold. But according to Bill, we still fall short in so many respects.
The half of donation would come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the other half would be from the family of Google co-founder Larry Page. The money would be doled out in grants of up to $2 million for individual projects that are bold and innovative.
The idea is that the $2 million, paid over two years, would be enough money for researchers to collect preliminary data in animal models. And then the most promising strategies could be eligible to apply for up to another $10 million to take the vaccine candidates to human trials. The foundation is looking for proposals that could be ready to start clinical trials by 2021.
The goal is to find a “game changing, universal solution” to address both pandemic and seasonal influenza. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates 290,000 to 650,000 people die from the latter each year, and while less common, pandemic influenza can be even more deadly.
Gates warned of a threat, global flu outbreak poses, killing millions of people worldwide and crippling health services in both developed and developing countries.
A new study by the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM) in the conference showed new flu, like the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic would now most likely kill 30 million people within six months.
This new vaccine would not only protect against pandemic flu but would also protect against every other type of virus.
Bill Gates in a sentiment has shared that this donation is just the early-stage money to begin the research process. The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war.
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