Bill Gates is funding new factories for 7 potential coronavirus vaccines and admits he could waste billions of dollars

Bill Gates is plowing money into building factories for seven promising coronavirus vaccine candidates, even though it will mean wasting billions of dollars.

THE Microsoft billionaire said that his philanthropic organisation, the Gates Foundation, could mobilise faster than governments to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

“Because our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we’ve thought about the epidemic, we did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort,” Gates said. “Our early money can accelerate things.”

Gates said he was picking the top seven vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time in serially saying, ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,” he said.

“It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the companies that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in this situation we’re in, where there are trillions of dollars being lost economically, it is worth it,” Gates said.