Seth Berkley

It's a bar.

As all these stories start in the bar, you know, it has to.

Well, it was a funny time because it was a few weeks after we heard about what was going on in Wuhan.

And, you know, initially it was thought to be a transmission from a wet market, you know, to people.

There wasn't any well-documented evidence of person-to-person transmission, although...

Of course, we were beginning to hear rumors of that going on.

And of course, that's what gets you nervous if you're a public health person.

And so the question we had at that moment was, is this the big one or is this just a dress rehearsal for the big one?

And Richard Hatchett, who runs CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, myself and my wife, Cynthia, who's also a physician, were sitting there and having that discussion.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was down the street saying, oh, yeah, some case came to the U.S., but don't worry about it.

There's no problem.

It's not going anywhere.

We got it completely under control.

The system's great.

Nothing.

And, you know, we were not sure about that at that moment.

And so really the question was, you know, how do you begin to scale up?

And we had at that point no mandate, no money, and no people.

Of course, Gavi was a large operation providing vaccines to more than 50% of the world's children.

But the board was quite clear that we couldn't take money away from that to do this new work.