Mark Suzman, CEO and newly appointed board members from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, hoped that the threat of Omicron tended to recede in April-May for most countries, including India.
In an interview with Surojit Gupta, Suzman said it helped regulate the MRNA plant to become an important field of collaboration with India in the coming months.
Quotes from interviews: When do you think Covid-19 pandemic will end, or will we be in this time? We track work and briefing.
If you see a number of modelsings carried out by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), they predict that, while we are still in the midst of a steep omicron crisis, there is a fair possibility that will begin to decline by quite steeply, and around April or maybe, or for most countries, including India, mostly on the mirror.
We need to maintain monitoring other variants.
Do you think the world and Covax have not been able to solve the problem of vaccine inequality? Over the past two years, and especially last year, injustice in the global distribution of vaccines remains a big challenge.
Covax cannot meet many of its original commitments, mostly because supplies have been taken by rich countries for their own citizens.
And that causes significant delays and setbacks.
Which is now starting to change significantly.
Covax has recently distributed a dose of one billion.
It is on track to continue to grow at fast speed …
the level of vaccination in low-income countries is still much lower than they need.
We hope that this is a changing year, and it really needs sustainable support for Covax from countries, both in terms of financial support and dose contributions.
Of course, the role of India and the role of Indian producers, especially with the covishield vaccine, will be a major key to fulfill this purpose.
Last year, Bill Gates told us in an interview that when the next pandemic came, the effort was to get a large MRNA factory in India.
Is there progress about that? We have invested for several years and see the way MRNA may be used to deal with diseases such as malaria, HIV, and TB, in addition to Covid and the potential for future pandemic threats.
As part of it, India, as the old global leader in the production of vaccines, truly will have an important part to play in the production of MRNA in the future.
We have been involved in several discussions providing technical support and connections to Indian colleagues.
This was something discussed by Bill Gates with PM when they met at COP26 at Glasgow at the end of last year, and we thought it would be a very important field of collaboration in the future.
What is the assessment of the foundation about how the Indian government has dealt with a pandemic on the three waves? Indian responses are very strong.
This pandemic has submitted a unique challenge in every country because the world has not faced something like this before.
Just take an example of a vaccine program and where India is one year after launching it with more than 1.6 billion doses, I think is a very impressive model for the whole world.
As usual, there are lessons, for some things around the provisions of oxygen in areas where we see and hope we can build and prepare threats in the future, but overall, a very strong response, and we have been proud and happy to be able to help Partners and work with our Indian colleagues.
‘In April-May, Omicron might be in the past’
