vaccines - making it happen

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Vaccine Development and Surveillance

Strategy Overview


Our Goal:

Advance public goods for global health through technological innovation. We do this by accelerating the development and commercialization of novel vaccines and the sustainable manufacture of existing vaccines, defining the global disease burden through better primary data and world-class modeling, and reducing the threat of epidemics through the development and use of innovative tools.
The Challenge

At A Glance

Tackling diseases individually won’t solve many global health challenges. Working across disease areas allows us to identify the public goods that can accelerate global health impact and reduce the threat of epidemics.

We believe technical innovation has a critical role to play in the design, development, and deployment of these public goods.

We invest in deep technical expertise and novel platforms in vaccine development and manufacturing to accelerate innovation for better, faster, and cheaper vaccines.

We also invest in building high-quality modeling and forecasting capabilities informed by trustworthy primary data. We make this information public to allow all experts to better prioritize our collective global health resources.

In global health, the focus we’ve put on fighting individual diseases has had enormous impact, yet many of the most stubborn challenges we face are shared across disease areas. Whether it’s accelerating the development of new vaccines, forecasting the global health challenges of tomorrow, or preparing for epidemics, we must work beyond the scope of one disease area and create durable public goods whose benefits permeate global health.

Vaccines are some of our most powerful tools in combating diseases. Yet despite substantial scientific advances and investment, bringing vaccines to market affordably and reliably remains a challenge. Promising candidates can fail late in development, and existing vaccines can face supply shortages, resulting in wasted time, investments, and missed opportunities to improve human health. The diseases of low-resource settings—whether they are entrenched, like malaria and HIV, or they are the next outbreak pathogen—are often some of the hardest to address scientifically. They are also often the least attractive commercially. These challenges mean vaccine development for low-resource settings will only be successful if we use innovation in technologies, platforms, processes, and business models to accelerate timelines and reduce costs.

Because developing new vaccines is a lengthy and expensive undertaking, it is particularly important that we understand how to prioritize our efforts. Some diseases lend themselves to vaccine intervention. Others, like the neglected tropical diseases, are best tackled through better deployment of existing interventions. And others, like noncommunicable diseases, require non-vaccine approaches. Unfortunately, because the quality of our primary data is so poor, it is difficult to answer questions such as how many deaths a malaria vaccine could prevent. Parents who experience the tragedy of losing a child may never know the true cause of death. The mystery behind these individual tragedies are then accumulated into a public health conundrum, making it impossible for product developers, governments, and funders to effectively prioritize the resources of global and public health.

The Opportunity

We believe we can accelerate the impact of vaccines in low-resource contexts by cultivating deep expertise in the vaccine-manufacturing process, quality control, and clinical evaluation. This expertise allows us to advise on more effective vaccine development programs and identify new areas of innovation to benefit multiple disease programs.

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Surveillance domain

Our Surveillance domain invests to improve the world’s understanding of the causes of mortality and disability through three activities: 1) unprecedented pathology-based surveillance through MITS in child deaths; 2) the extrapolation of that data nationwide through Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA); and 3) improving the modeling and mapping of global mortality and disease data through the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Epidemic Preparedness domain

Our Epidemic Preparedness domain aims to reduce the threat of epidemics by investing in novel vaccines and rapid-response platforms, innovative surveillance methods, and accountability systems to improve country-level preparedness.
The sooner it happens, the better.
Hopefully, before the impatient nutcases infect us all.
Anything to be said for educating people on how to naturally strengthen their immune systems? wave

For organisations that claim to care so much about help, it's amazing how little money and effort is spent on this.

Instead it's pills, vaccines, 'quick fixes' that in the big picture actually just weaken the immune system. Big Pharma baby love $$$

Of course in some circumstances vaccines are needed. Most understandably for the elderly and people with particularly vulnerable immune systems.

My grievance though is with how little focus is put on health and resilience in general. The cynic in us says this is because there's very little profit in a (at large) fit and healthy populace. And sadly many of our 'leaders' take money off many of the companies that rely in illness to make money, in order to get elected. It's a bad deal.
Chancer - I do not care to argue with you on the veracity of Vaccination usage. One thing I will say is a vaccination protocol does not work unless you achieve what is called Herd Immunity - IE somewhere between 85 and 95 per cent of the total population must me immunized - else there is sense bothering with the effort.

The same could be said for your good foods and healthy environment. Achieving good health for ALL is admirable goal - but in the meantime our best bet is continue on with vaccinations.
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by OldeGuy
created Apr 2020
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