Gates Package — page 1026

Finally, the world's vaccine plan should establish a way to allocate doses rationally, so that they provide the greatest benefit for public health and don't simply go to the highest bidders. COVAX was intended to solve this problem during COVID, but for reasons that were mostly out of its control, it fell far short of its goals. There were bureaucratic barriers, delivery problems in countries with struggling health systems, and rich-country governments negotiating their own deals, which put them first in line. The world will need to do better next time, a subject I'll return to in Chapter 9.10 *** Of course, financing scientific work on new vaccines is only part of the equation. Those vaccines actually have to be made-- even faster than the COVID vaccines were--and by far, the most promising technology to do that is mRNA vaccines. For most people, these seemed to come out of the blue, but in fact they were the product of decades of dogged work by researchers and product developers, including two who had to fight tooth and nail for their revolutionary idea. From the time she was sixteen years old, Katalin Karikó knew that she wanted to become a scientist. She had a particular fascination with messenger RNA, or mRNA, molecules that (among other things) direct the creation of proteins in your body. In the 1980s, while working on her PhD in her native Hungary, she became convinced that tiny strands called messenger RNA could be injected into cells to allow the body to make its own medicines. <~?~Insert art 028_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist, co-discovered RNA technology that is now used in the development of mRNA vaccines.