Gates Package — page 1095

So a key step in my pandemic-prevention plan is to invest in three main areas: vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments. Of course, none of these advances will mean much if there isn't a system to deliver them, a subject I'll come to later in this chapter. Vaccines The world surpassed all expectations by developing multiple effective and safe COVID vaccines faster than it has ever made any vaccine, and by churning out billions of doses within a year. But almost as soon as we started rolling out vaccines, the virus fought back, mutating in ways that made our current vaccines less effective. And the vaccines' protective effect started going down within six months of patients' receiving them. In the short term, I see three key steps: Adapt today's vaccines for variants. This includes coordinating testing of current vaccines against new variants as soon as they emerge, to see which ones stay most effective, and then smoothing the path for improved versions to be approved as quickly as possible, Scientists can also work to get ahead of the variants by coordinating their efforts to sequence genomes, which will help researchers understand how the virus might evolve in the future. |With this knowledge, vaccine manufacturers could be preparing inadvance| 'Commented [FA(I2]: Besides sequencing we need to 'continue to study viruses in the animal populations to get a Adjust vaccination strategies to reflect reality on the ground. Not every country's ewe Seer See ee study of the animal human interface could impede our ability COVID profile is exactly the same. In one place, most people might have been 'to understand the plasticity of the virus Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] 2022-01-08 12:25:00 given a previous vaccine. In another, most people might have natural immunity because they've already been infected. What this means is that updated vaccines can't be used in the same way everywhere. Health officials will need