Creating A Variant-Proof World

RICHARD HATCHETT, CEO, COALITION FOR EPIDEMIC PREPAREDNESS INNOVATIONS: Well, they need to provide those doses to other countries with enough lead time that the countries can absorb them and use them. I mean, I mean, depositing doses with a country — donating doses that have two weeks until they expire obviously creates really significant challenges, and is not going to be good for the world good or good for the countries that are receiving the doses. COVAX, we have set up a donation mechanism that would allow us to allocate doses to countries that are ready to absorb them and use them as quickly as possible. So we can work with countries like the U.S. or the U.K. or others who have doses where the shelf life is decreasing, so that those doses can go to the best use possible. Obviously, having to dispose of them in the countries where they expired is not desirable at all.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Right. And, obviously, the J&J, it’s just one dose, easier to administer as well. You have warned the world that the reason to do this is not just to be equitable and on a humanitarian basis, but also to avoid a nightmare scenario, nightmare scenario, obviously, going back a century ago to the 1918 Spanish Flu. There are millions of people who may be thinking the worst is behind us, especially in countries that are seeing a high vaccine rate. Why are you still sounding the alarm that this isn’t over?

HATCHETT: Well, it’s not over for the rest of the world. I mean, there is a sense, certainly in the United Kingdom, where I am, I understand in the United States, that the worst of the pandemic seems to be behind the U.S. and the U.K. That is absolutely not the case in the rest of the world. You look at the recent situation in India. A fact that I have been citing recently, in Peru, in the Western Hemisphere, they have recently elevated their per capita mortality rate. They now estimate that they have had 184,000 people out of a population of just 33 million have died. That per capita mortality rate is higher than the per capita mortality in the U.S. or the U.K. during the 1918 influenza, which we all take as our benchmark for a terrible pandemic. And without vaccine, other countries, the outcomes in Peru could be replicated in other countries, which would be a disaster.