Seth Berkley

And even the same thing happened on the wastage side, which we talk a lot about in the book.

You know, reporters were looking for evidence of wastage.

And the truth is there was wastage everywhere, particularly because of the many different types of vaccines countries were developing.

But nobody wanted to talk about that because they were worried about the opposition leaders saying, look at all the money that, you know, so-and-so wasted.

And so it was like kind of the dirty secret.

Switzerland ultimately published its numbers, which I put in the book,

And that was, you know, enlightening.

But I said to the G7, G20 leaders, it would help enormously if you would just admit that there's wastage because in a pandemic, you don't want to go short.

You want to go long.

You want to have extra doses of vaccine.

And obviously, you don't want to waste anything if you can help it, but you don't want to be short.

So, you know, we were also in this situation where donors were desperate.

desperate to not have us waste a single dose.

And we ended up having very low wastage, much less actually than we predicted.

But this was also one of the processes that had to be worked through during this period.

So in a sense, we were lucky because we had worked very hard to build up the immunization system

before this.

So we had built 65,000 new cold chain points.

And a lot of it was modern, you know, environmentally sound, solar-based cold chain for countries that didn't have, you know, strong electricity systems, et cetera.

So, and we were, of course, vaccines are the most widely distributed health intervention.