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7 It's also the home for parts of the world waited for limited doses to arrive by someone traveling by foot to their region. Finally, we'll wrap up this chapter with a new kind of drug that would complement vaccines -ones that you could inhale and would keep the virus from getting into your body in the first place. Protecting yourself and others would be no more complicated than treating your hay fever. *** My initiation into the world of vaccines came in the late 1990s, as I was learning about global health. When I discovered that children in poor countries were dying of diseases that kids in rich countries never died of--and that the main reason was that one group got certain vaccines and the other group didn't--I read up on the economics of immunization. It was a classic case of a market failure: Billions of people needed the great inventions of modern medicine, but because they had so little money, they had no way of expressing their needs in ways that matter to markets. So they went without. One of our first major projects at the Gates Foundation was to help create and organize Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance,* an organization that pools donations to help poor countries buy vaccines. Gavi created a market where there wasn't one: Since 2000, it has helped vaccinate more than 820 million children and prevented some 14 million deaths.7 It's also the home for COVAX, the program created to provide COVID vaccines for low- and middle-income countries. It's safe to say that Gavi is one of the foundation's contributions that I am most proud of. * Formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, or GAVI, they changed their name a few years ago to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.