The most urgent invention in the world right
now
is a vaccine that prevents you from getting
COVID-19.
What vaccines do,
is they teach your immune system about the
pathogen.
This is a coronavirus.
And this shape, on its outside, is called
the spike protein.
It grabs on to the cells in your body
that have a particular receptor
and get that cell to make billions of copies
of this virus.
The first time that you're exposed to this
virus
it takes literally days for your immune system
to realize that it's a bad thing.
So how do we get the immune system to go faster?
The idea of a vaccine is to give you an exposure
to something that looks like this, so you’re
getting your body
to make a lot of antibodies that can take
these viruses and actually kill them.
There’s over 100 different efforts,
making many different types of coronavirus
vaccines.
So, how do you make a vaccine?
Usually you’re injecting at least part of
the shape of the virus.
Sometimes you do the whole virus,
but it’s attenuated so it doesn’t multiply
too much.
Sometimes you take the virus and you kill
it.
You won't get sick because they're not duplicating.
What’s typically done is
you just take either a piece of the virus
or, just the spike,
that thing on the surface, and you put it
on something else,
so there's no risk at all of causing the disease.
One final way that's new and is promising
is called the RNA vaccine.
With RNA and DNA, instead of putting that
shape in,
you put instructions in the code to make that
shape.
So, the Gates Foundation, along with a great
number of partners,
are looking at these different efforts.
We've never created a new vaccine in less
than five years,
So, this is urgent and it's going to require
incredible collaboration.
It's going to have to go to 7 billion people.
So, I am optimistic that one of the vaccine
efforts
will give us vaccines in the next 18 months,
and we'll make sure that it's produced in
volume
and that it's accessible to everyone in the
world.
That's how we're going to end this pandemic.
