Seth Berkley

We went from the 1970s, and I cover this in the book, because there's also a story about vaccine equity,

less than 5% of people in the world got even a single dose of vaccines, much less all the ones that were available there.

And you fast forward to right before the pandemic, it was around 90, 91% were plugged into the routine system and got at least one dose through that.

So that meant there were health workers, there were cold chain points, there were supply chains,

And what's extraordinary is during the pandemic, routine vaccines went down in 2020 about 4%, and then 2021, another 1%.

And that was terrible because it puts at risk the traditional diseases and children's lives.

But if you think about it, those health workers delivered three times the number of doses they had ever done in history.

And if you said to me,

you know, we're going to do this, I would have thought that the drop would have been much higher.

So, they continued the routine vaccines, plus they brought these new vaccines and delivered them to the elderly and to healthcare workers and to people with comorbidities.

On the cold chain stuff, we, of course, didn't have ultra-cold chain.

The only time we used ultra-cold chain before was in Ebola.

The Ebola vaccine needed to be an ultra-cold chain, and we worked through how to do that and how to do it in

in transit, you know, to have carriers, because we had to use it in DRC and the tropics and, you know, places way off the grid, but not to the scale ultimately we wanted.

So it would have been better for us to roll out, you know, traditional vaccines and traditional cold chain, two to eight degrees regular refrigerators.

But, you know, people wanted mRNA because that was what, you know, the U.S.

and other countries were using.

And so we did our best.

And ultimately that became the most valuable

The vaccine we distributed the most were mRNA vaccines, which meant we had to all of a sudden scramble and build ultra cold chain around the world.