Thanks for having me.

Let's start with the pandemic, and with vaccine nationalism.

Something that I know is of great concern to you,

you've spoken up about.

Your foundation has done some research.

You modelled vaccine scenarios to see the impact, whether...

if there was nationalism and if there

was vaccine fair distribution.

And you found a very clearly that the deaths

were doubled in the case of rich countries hoarding vaccines.

That is what is happening today, isn't it?

It is.

You're seeing wealthy nations vaccinate their populations

and it's incredibly unfortunate.

Do you accept that, to a certain extent,

it is quite difficult for governments

who know that they need to be re-elected or elected,

that there is a lot of political pressure on them

to vaccinate their own population first?

Yeah.

...and how do you strike that balance between convincing them

that actually what's happening in India today, for example,

will affect them down the road?

Well I think if you're a leader of a country,

absolutely you want to vaccinate your population.

And so, while I say it's disappointing to see

that the wealthy countries are vaccinating,

it's great for their nation.

But I think you should vaccinate up to a point,

and you hit a certain age population where you say,

OK, we're going to pause and make sure

that we then put both money and extra supply

on the global market.

There's a mechanism called COVAX.

It needs $2bn more funding, and it needs vaccine supply.

But we know - thank goodness it got set up during the pandemic

- we know it can distribute vaccine.

It's distributed vaccine to 40 countries already,

but it needs more money and more supply.

So I think you don't need to vaccinate all the way down,

say, to your teen population before you - you can certainly

make a donation now of money - but before you send out

vaccine doses to COVAX.

So where would you draw the line?

Is it for under 30s, for example?

So once you've vaccinated everyone who's over 30

then you would suggest that donations

are made to developing and poorer countries?

Yes.

I think you pick an age..

20, 30... right in that range.

You give money now, so we fully fund COVAX.

But you also start to give vaccines,

and you give extra doses.

We will get out of this problem as the manufacturing comes

along and there's far more of it.

But look, to have low-income countries who can't even

vaccinate their healthcare workers.

I mean that's the system people are going into

to take care of one another.

You have to get the entire health system populated

and the elderly vaccinated as well.

This, to a certain extent, is what a lot of leaders

have talked about, but are not actually doing.

So there have been proposals, for example, that 5 per cent

or 6 per cent of your own vaccine supply

should be donated.

What can you do, and what do you think

can be done in order to convince governments to do this now?

Well you can both use the moral argument

- we don't want to see more people die.

We're seeing it on the news, every morning when

you turn on the news, we're seeing what's

happening around the world.

Governments are starting to realise, oh my gosh,

if we don't get the global population vaccinated

we're going to have more variants,

and they're going to spring up in different places

in the world, and bounce back into our own countries.

So that is an argument that absolutely leaders

are listening to.

And they want to get, not just their own economy reopen,

they want to get the world's economy reopen.

If you want to get tourism going again,

you want to get manufacturing going again,

it benefits all of us to have the global economy reopened.

So those are arguments that are being made,

and governments are beginning to listen.

Who do you think is listening?

I do think the US government is looking

at their supply of vaccine and deciding, OK, how much of it

should we do through COVAX?

How much should we do bilaterally?

So I think you're going to start to see some movement there.

Let's talk about patents and IP.

I know that the foundation defends

patents to drive innovation.

Some activists argue that they really should be overturned,

and this is a very special case, the global pandemic.

What's your thinking on this?

Well I think you have to look at,

where is the current problem in the system right now

during this pandemic, and how do we

fix that piece of the system?

So if you look at what we call the upstream, the R&D piece.

A vaccine, several vaccines have been created in the shortest

period possible in the history of the world for a disease

that humanity has never seen.

So that part of the system is actually working today.

The piece that is not working today is the manufacturing.

We have huge manufacturing bottlenecks,

we don't have enough raw materials,

we don't have manufacturing in the right places.

And so it's allowing the nations that

have the manufacturing in place to hoard their vaccines.

And so we've got to fix that piece,

and then we also have to do the appropriate tech transfers

from the pharmaceutical companies

and have the incentives so that they tech transfer.

And so that's the role of-...

So you favour tech transfers, but not patents?

Not changing the patent system as it

exists right now in the middle of a pandemic.

That system has benefited, is benefiting

the world at the moment.

But it doesn't have to set a precedent necessarily, does it?

Given that this is such a special case.

But you're seeing the tech transfers happen.

So when you're in the middle of a pandemic,

I wouldn't take down the system that's working.

I would look at, where is the problem?

It's a manufacturing problem.

Should we look at the IP piece over time?

Absolutely, and maybe what you do

is set up ahead of time in a pandemic.

Hey, if they're going to be certain companies that

are able to make vaccines, how do you

keep them incentivised to do those tech transfers?

And how do we put the money in up-front to have manufacturing?

We should have far more manufacturing

on the continent of Africa.

But if you look at the current system, the AstraZeneca

vaccine, we've been deeply involved

in the tech transfer that happened to Serum Institute

in India, they are pumping out millions of doses every month.

They're about to get up to 100m doses a month.

But now they are in a situation, which is quite ironic,

because there was...

AstraZeneca is being made there.

But now they're in a situation where they will not be

able to send it anywhere else.

That's right.

Because they've got a new surge.

Exactly, and so that's my point.

That's why we need to have manufacturing

in far more places around the world,

so that we can get it out and you

don't have this hoarding problem that we're seeing right now.

You mentioned AstraZeneca and the vaccines

made by both AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are

the ones that are expected to immunise a lot of people

in poorer countries.

And yet they seem to carry this very rare blood clotting

disease, the side effects.

What impact do you think this is going to have?

And do you think that it is already increasing vaccine

hesitancy?

Well we know if you interview populations today,

for instance in France, there was already vaccine hesitancy.

And if you talk to people, it is going up

because of what they're hearing about this thrombosis.

However, once you start rolling vaccine out,

what we've seen even in the US, is that the vaccine hesitancy

begins to go down.

We all want to know that what we're putting in our bodies,

these biologics, are safe for us, and for our family members,

and our grandparents.

And so it will go down over time.

Four out of five people on the continent of Africa

still say they want the AstraZeneca or the J&J vaccine.

It's interesting that in the UK it hasn't really

increased vaccine hesitancy.

People are taking it every single day,

and everyone's desperate for it.

That's right.

And I think you have to look at what are the number of cases?

Sure it's tragic for those who do

have these cases of thrombosis, but you also

have to look at what are your chances of getting

COVID and ending up on a ventilator or dying.

And so if you weigh that cost-benefit analysis,

certainly I would take the J&J vaccine,

even though I'm a female in the age category

that has that risk.

Yeah, I'm with you on that.

But how do you rate the overall performance of the pharma

industry in this pandemic?

I wonder whether companies could have acted, not necessarily

faster but with greater transparency.

There have been a lot of calls, for example,

for contracts to be published and to be made public.

There was a dispute between the UK

and the EU when it comes to AstraZeneca,

and in fact the UK's now suing AstraZeneca.

Do you think that there could have been more transparency?

And there should have been more transparency?

There certainly could have been more transparency.

I don't think you can rate the entire industry overall.

I think you have some good actors in this pandemic,

and some not good actors.

And I think we'll see as this rolls forward, you

know who is making enormous profits off

of vaccine, versus who did do the right thing

and do tech transfers.

So you know I think there is a reckoning to be had here,

but I don't think that during the middle of a pandemic

I should be criticising the pharmaceutical industry

writ large.

You've written a lot about the impact

of Covid-19 on women and girls.

And you've been making the case that to recover fully

from the pandemic, leaders have to respond to the ways

that it's affecting men and women differently.

What should be done?

And do you see any good examples of what is being done,

any models that other governments could look at?

Yes, so...

I'm really glad you brought this up.

I mean Oxfam published a report just yesterday that says,

women have lost $800bn of income.

And so why is that?

There are multi-reasons.

Women often hold the informal jobs or the low-income jobs

in many countries, but the predominant reason

is caregiving.

And so finally we're seeing what's

always been there all along.

Women on average do 30 hours of caregiving a week.

That is like another full-time job.

And so I'm seeing countries that had already good, paid

family medical leave policies, they're

recovering more quickly.

So what should be done?