Bill Gates Investing $40 Million For mRNA Vaccine Development In Africa

Bill Gates Investing $40 Million For mRNA Vaccine Development In Africa

Naveen Athrappully

The Gates Foundation is spending $40 million on countries in Africa and other economically backward nations to produce new mRNA vaccines in efforts to prevent against diseases like tuberculosis and malaria.

On Monday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $40 million in funding to "advance access to mRNA research and vaccine manufacturing technology that will support low-and middle-income countries’ (LMICs) capacity to develop high-quality, lifesaving vaccines at scale," according to an Oct. 9 press release. The $40 million will be spent on boosting access to a low-cost mRNA research and manufacturing platform developed by Belgium-based Quantoom Biosciences.

While $20 million will go to Quantoom, two research institutes in Africa—located in Senegal and South Africa—will get $5 million each. The remaining $10 million will go to vaccine manufacturers from low- and middle-income countries.

Quantoom’s platform can lead to a more than 50 percent drop in mRNA vaccine development costs compared to traditional mRNA technology, the release said.

The foundation argues that mRNA vaccines have “simpler research and manufacturing processes” compared to traditional vaccines. As such, expanding the technology to countries like South Africa and Senegal can lead to the development of low-cost mRNA vaccines for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

The $40 million funding adds to the foundation’s previous investment worth $55 million in mRNA manufacturing technology.

“Putting innovative mRNA technology in the hands of researchers and manufacturers in Africa and around the world will help ensure more people benefit from next-generation vaccines,” said Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s coordinating minister of health and social welfare and a global expert on vaccines.

“This collaboration is an encouraging step that will increase access to critical health technologies and help African countries develop vaccines that meet the needs of their people.”

The Gates foundation’s new investment comes as mRNA technology has sparked numerous safety concerns. During a testimony at the European Parliament last month, cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough said that everything he has learned about mRNA vaccines has been “horrifying.”

“There's not a single study showing that the messenger RNA is broken down” in the human body once it is injected, he said. “There's not a study showing it leaves the body.” Since the vaccines are “made synthetically, it cannot be broken down.”

For the COVID-19 vaccine, the mRNA sequence was copied from the virus's spike protein, which was considered at least one of the aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that made it so harmful to the body.

“We have the spike protein—the lethal protein from the [COVID-19] vaccines found in the human body after vaccination—circulating at least for six months, if not longer. And if people take an injection in another six months, there's another installation in more circulating potentially lethal protein,” Dr. McCullough said of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.

Scientist Drew Weissman, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his role in developing the mRNA technology, warned in a 2018 paper that not only did clinical trials of mRNA vaccines produce “more modest [results] in humans than was expected based on animal models,” but that the “side effects were not trivial.”

More...