Gates Package — page 922

six months. But innovation does not happen in an instant. It takes years of patient, persistent effort by scientists--who will fail more often than they succeed--as well as funding, smart policies, and an entrepreneur's mindset to get an idea out of the lab and into the market. It's frightening to imagine how much worse COVID would've been if the U.S. government and others hadn't invested years ago in research on vaccines that use mRNA or another approach called a viral vector. In 2021 alone, they accounted for more than half a billion people doses worldwide.9 (I'll explain how both work in Chapter 6.) Without them, we would've been far worse off. The pandemic has offered up dozens of other concrete examples of innovative ideas, new diagnostic tools, treatments, policies, and even ways to fund the delivery of all these things around the world. Scientists have gained crucial insights into how viruses move from person to person. And since transmission of the flu virus essentially shut down during the first year of COVID, researchers now know that it's possible to stop influenza, which bodes well for future outbreaks of flu and other diseases. COVID also highlights an inescapable fact about innovation: Most of the world's greatest talent for translating research into products is in the private sector. Not everyone likes that arrangement, but the profit motive is often the most powerful force in the world for getting new products created quickly. It's the government's role to invest in the basic research that leads to major innovations, and to create policies that let new ideas flourish. And when there are market failures--when the people who need lifesaving tools the most can't afford them--then governments, nonprofits, and foundations should step in to fill the gap, often by finding the right way to work with the private sector.