New Delhi, India

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, who was once at the helm of Microsoft, recently highlighted the role of India in the global fight against COVID-19.

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While speaking at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting 2020, Gates spoke about the challenges in developing and deploying a potential vaccine for COVID-19.

He called India’s role in making the vaccines on a large-scale critical, owing to the country’s manufacturing capabilities. 

Also read: India posts lowest daily new coronavirus cases in nearly three months

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Calling India “very inspiring”, Gates said that India had achieved a lot in the healthcare sector over the last two decades.

“And now, India’s research and manufacturing will be critical to fighting COVID-19 especially when it comes to making vaccines at large scale,”  news agency PTI reported him as saying.

Gates referred to the fight against COVID as a “grand challenge” for scientists across the world.

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“Since the pandemic began, scientists have shared 1,37,000 viral COVID-19 genomic sequences,” Gates said. 

He also added that Pharma companies are showing cooperation with producers unlike ever before.

Also read: Coronavirus: Worldwide cases surpass 40 million; more than 50% cases from US, India and Brazil

Bill Gates said that mRNA vaccine has shown “great promises”, and that it would probably the first approved vaccine for the virus.

“Even when sometimes people are tested, results come back negative because some of the tests are not sensitive to the small nano virus… So, the diagnostics are letting us down” he said.

“Right now, the current business model is identifying people with symptoms and we need to change that. We need sensitive and specific diagnostic tests which matter and we need to make it easy to access,” he said.