Billionaire Bill Gates, who was a key figure in vaccine advocacy during the coronavirus crisis, has told the 2022 meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos that the that current COVID-19 vaccines “don’t have much in the way of duration and they’re not good at infection blocking.”
He said that the vaccines had saved “millions of lives” but that vaccines were preferably “infection-blocking and long duration.”
Yesterday in #Davos, @BillGates said "the vaccines have saved millions of lives" yet admitted that current COVID-19 vaccines "don't have much in the way of duration and they're not good at infection blocking." @wef #WEF22 pic.twitter.com/Q2Co8R5mRf
— Matt Gaspers (@MattGaspers) May 26, 2022
Covid-19 vaccines were found to have protective power against serious illness and hospitalizations but their efficacy in preventing infections were found to have waned dramatically over time.
One study, published in Science, examined the records of nearly 800,000 U.S. veterans and found that the three most popular Covid-19 vaccines were initially roughly equal in their ability to prevent infections, but that over time that changed dramatically.
After six months, Moderna’s two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, measured as 89% effective initially, was only 58% effective. The effectiveness of shots made by Pfizer and BioNTech, also employing two doses, fell from 87% to 45% in the same period.
And the protective power of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine plunged from 86% to just 13% over six months.
The WEF meeting also heard that a partnership between US drug maker Pfizer and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to speed up the development of vaccines to prevent diseases that cause newborn mortality will also advance efforts to make a high-tech malaria vaccine.
“[We have] a dream for [beating] malaria, and we’ll talk to all the great mRNA companies, including Pfizer, about this … we could use that mRNA platform to make a really powerful malaria vaccine,” Mr Gates said.
The number of deaths from malaria worldwide is rising again, partly due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have the malaria vaccine that we funded with [British pharmaceutical company] GSK. But the duration of protection is too short and so [it could be] possible now that mRNA has been proven, that we’ll be able to solve that problem,” said Mr Gates.
“We have pretty good drugs and pretty good bed nets, we have to constantly change the drugs because you get drug resistance … we have to change the active ingredients, we have a great pipeline of that,” he said.
“We have some genetic approaches, called gene drive, that are still in the laboratory that may cut mosquito populations.”
More funding was needed, however, said Mr Gates.
“So, a lot of R&D investment [is needed], a lot of delivery investment, Global Fund is the biggest multilateral in that space,” he said.
“And so hopefully, if they can raise the $18 billion they hope to, we’ll take the increase in malaria deaths of the last couple of years and get it back down to a much lower number.”