Gates Package — page 1085

al To do all this work, the Global Fund had to establish a solution for reaching people in need. It set up financing mechanisms so it could raise money and get it out the door quickly. It built systems to deliver medicines in some of the most remote places on the planet. It established networks of laboratories and set up supply chains When the Global Fund turned all these assets toward COVID, the results were impressive. It raised almost $4 billion for the COVID response in a single year, and it worked with more than 100 governments and more than a dozen programs that help multiple countries.12 Thanks to the fund, countries were able to buy COVID tests, oxygen, and medical supplies. They got protective equipment for their frontline health workers and stepped up their contact tracing efforts. Although about a sixth of the additional money supplemented the work on HIV, TB, and malaria to deal with pandemic issues, there were still big setbacks; because of COVID, TB deaths rose in 2020 for the first time in more than a decade.13 Making and testing new vaccines When the effort to develop a vaccine went into high gear, it relied heavily on work that had been done for infectious diseases. For instance, mRNA technology had been in the pipeline for decades, with a lot of commercial funding to explore its potential as a cancer treatment. (It works by causing cells to express proteins that can do many things, such as activating the immune system against an infectious disease or against cancer cells.) Then, when it came time for human trials of vaccines--which is typically a long and expensive process, as you'll recall from Chapter 6--researchers turned to the HIV Vaccine Trials Network. As the name suggests, it was established to create an infrastructure that could speed up trials on HIV vaccines, a system that proved crucial in COVID vaccine trials. Although very few