Ensuring rapid and equitable access to effective oral COVID-19 therapies is essential to reducing health disparities from COVID-19 and building a better response system for future epidemics and pandemics. A multipronged strategy for medical countermeasures must include antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, and other mechanisms to fight infections. Better strategies to deploy oral antivirals, which have been important in the context of COVID-19, will also help to prepare the system to deploy medical countermeasures at a large scale in future outbreaks.
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will be in Nairobi, Kenya, to visit national and local leaders, partners, and grantees; meet with regional scientists and innovators; and announce the foundation’s forward-looking commitment
Most R&D money flows from the private sector, which aims to maximize returns on investment. As a result, health R&D largely skews towards rich countries’ priorities and health system technical capacities, leaving significant gaps in diseases that primarily affect poor and marginalized populations.