Eric Topol

am just delighted on our new podcast of Ground Truths to welcome Seth Berkley.

Seth has been a major force in vaccines around the world, and he has a new book called Fair Doses, which we're going to be discussing today.

And if you have questions, you can put them in the message as we go forward, and we're going to get right into it.

Seth is a

noted physician epidemiologist who has been so active in these international public-private partnerships with the AIDS vaccine and then 12 years of Gavi.

And in this new book,

He describes the story, which I guess we'll start back at Davos, January 2020.

You're in the Hard Rock, is it a bar, the cafe?

This is an incredible story, one that would really be, you know, in the archives of just beyond belief in medicine.

So it's January 2020.

Most people haven't even acknowledged that there's a pandemic.

Right.

And you're making some big plans.

Tell us about what was going on then.

You know, it's just incredible the insight that you all had and the partners like Richard Hatchett and Seppi and others that you brought together so early, you know, months before people started to realize that this was a real deal, major pandemic.

And it's extraordinary because what this led to, I think a lot of people don't know this, Sepp.

This led to, as you said, the fastest, but we're talking about 39 days after the very first vaccine, and it's in Ghana with COVAX.

Yeah, what we're talking about, just so everybody knows, 2 billion doses by the end of 2024, 146 countries, 2.7 million lives saved from this effort.

And as you say, 39 days to get it to India, where most of the people in the U.S.

hadn't even gotten into the vaccine startup.