[I]n Houston (and elsewhere in Texas) is an area known as the Fifth Ward... Driving... deep into this neighborhood reminded me of the terrible povert… - Peter J. Hotez

The reason why we have this situation now with Omicron... is we allowed large unvaccinated populations in low- and middle-income countries to remain unvaccinated. Delta arose out of an unvaccinated population in India in early 2021, and Omicron out of a large unvaccinated population on the African continent later in the same year. So, these two variants of concern represent failures, failures by global leaders to work with sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America to vaccinate the Southern Hemisphere, vaccinate the Global South.... myself...Dr. Bottazzi... and our team of 20 scientists... make vaccines for diseases that the pharma companies won’t make... the only thing we know how to do is make low-cost, straightforward vaccines for use in resource-poor settings... it was very difficult to get funding. We got no support from Operation Warp Speed, no support really from the G7 countries... now we’ve licensed our prototype vaccine, and help in the co-development, to India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and now Botswana.... it’s really exciting to show that, you know, you don’t need to be a multinational pharmaceutical company and just make brand-new technologies that will only be suitable for the Northern Hemisphere. We can really make a vaccine for the world.

In 2011, together with a team of 15 scientists, I relocated to Houston, Texas, to launch a new school devoted to poverty-related diseases. The National School of Tropical Medicine at is a joint venture among three biomedical institutions—Baylor, , and the —with a mission devoted to research on and training in the treatment of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs...

[H]ad we had those investments early on, to carry this all the way through clinical trials years ago, we could have had a vaccine ready to go.