Microsoft founder Bill Gates stated Saturday that medicine and a future vaccine to deal with COVID-19 ought to go the place they’re most wanted, not simply to “the very best bidder,” Reuters reported.

“If we simply let medicine and vaccines go to the very best bidder, as a substitute of to the folks and the locations the place they’re most wanted, we’ll have an extended, extra unjust, deadlier pandemic,” Gates stated (remotely) throughout a COVID-19 convention. “We’d like leaders to make these onerous choices about distributing based mostly on fairness, not simply on market-driven elements.”

The WHO said on July 6th there have been 21 candidate vaccines in medical trials being examined on human volunteers. Public well being consultants have cautioned against “vaccine nationalism” —the place nations vie towards one another to get a possible vaccine first— which they predict would have dire penalties for each public well being and the worldwide financial system.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged a total of $250 million towards COVID-19 analysis and research “to assist the improvement of diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines… and assist mitigate the social and financial impacts of the virus.”

Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in 2000 and left his full-time role at Microsoft in 2008 to concentrate on the foundation work. In 2015, he warned throughout a TED Talk about how the world is not ready for a worldwide pandemic.