Gates Package — page 1038

ithe up the infrastructure for running them, for instance--will help with vaccines just as much as with drugs. In addition, during COVID, researchers and regulators have learned a great deal about how safe mRNA and viral vector vaccines are, and they'll be able to use this understanding to evaluate candidates even faster in the future. *** Let's continue the hypothetical outbreak example from Chapter 5. Suppose the world wasn't able to contain it in time, and it's going global, so we'll need to vaccinate billions of people. Several vaccines have made it through the approval and review process and are licensed for use in humans. Now we need to solve a whole other set of problems: How do we make enough of it and distribute the doses so they do the most good? To give you a sense of how many more doses we'll need to make: The world typically produces around 5 billion doses of vaccines every year--that's counting all childhood vaccinations, flu shots, polio vaccines, and more. If there's a huge outbreak, we'll need to make nearly 8 billion doses of a new vaccine (one for just about every person on earth), and maybe as many 16 billion (if it's a two-dose vaccine). And we need to do it without backsliding on other lifesaving vaccines. Our goal should be to do it in six months. And, if you're a vaccine manufacturer, you're going to face challenges at each step in the manufacturing process: In the first step--producing the active ingredient that makes your vaccine work--you might need to grow cells or bacteria, infect them with the pathogen you want to stop, and harvest the substances they produce for your vaccine. To do this, you'll need a container called a bioreactor--either a reusable steel vat