Seth Berkley

So we had to begin to fundraise.

And there's a delay from the time you actually get a promise of money till the time you get it.

So we ultimately raised $12.5 billion for this.

But as we got to the end of 2020, for example, we had commitments of about $2 billion.

But

We only had $400 million in the bank.

So we were living from, you know, one grant to another to be able to make agreements with pharmaceutical companies to put orders in place and also to begin to do technology transfers.

So the original idea wasn't

vaccinate the whole world.

It was hard during that moment.

Everybody was panicked.

The original idea was to cover the high-risk populations across the world because we understood from a vaccine nationalism point of view, it's every leader's job to vaccinate their population.

So it made sense for countries to say, I want vaccines for us first.

But the question is, did they need to cover everybody in the country or could they cover their high risk?

And then could we

cover other high risk.

And for example, I think physicians, nurses, healthcare workers around the world needed to be covered because they were the front lines and the heroes of this in terms of doing it.

So that's what we were trying to do.

The challenge was not even that people were vaccinating, but when countries begin to buy up doses, they said, we don't know if any of these vaccines are going to work or which one.

So the wealthy countries didn't buy one vaccine.