The big pharma companies are still not going in. Some of the biotechs are starting to, because they're trying to really accelerate their technology..… - Peter J. Hotez

We invite scientists from all over the world to come into our vaccine labs to learn how to make vaccines under a quality umbrella, whereas you cannot walk into Merck or GSK or Pfizer or Moderna and say, “Show me how to make a vaccine.” With our group, we can.... the biggest frustration was never really getting that support from the G7 countries... I going on cable news networks... trying to raise meager funds just to get started... fortunately, we were able to get some funding through Texas- and New York-based philanthropies, and...we raised about...$7 million...with that, we were able to pay our scientists to actually do this, transfer the technology, no patent, no strings attached, to India, now, as I said, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana... we’ve been getting calls for help all over the world from ministries of science and ministries of health, and we do what we can. We could do a lot — I mean, if we had even a fraction of the support that, say, Moderna or the other pharma companies had gotten, who knows? We might have been able to have the whole world vaccinated by now.... It’s even a vegan vaccine... So, now our partners in Indonesia... are trying to do this as a halal vaccine for Muslim-majority countries, which is pretty exciting, as well.

[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 poverty I had seen... in destitute areas of Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, and China. I saw... images... just like the standard global disease movie typically shown to first-year public health or medical students. ...It was even more astonishing when we turned our global health lens inward to study diseases that were infecting impoverished areas... [W]e found widespread NTDs... in Texas and elsewhere in the southern United States. ...NTDs are first and foremost diseases of acute poverty. ...[W]e determined that 12 million Americans who live at such poverty levels suffer from at least one NTD. The diseases include neglected parasitic infections such as , , , and .

[O]ne of the things that we're not hearing a lot about is the unique potential safety problem of Coronavirus vaccines. ...This was first found in the early 1960s with the respiratory syncytial virus [RSV] vaccines, and it was done here in Washington with the NIH and Children's National Medical Center... [S]ome of those kids that got the vaccine actually did worse, and I believe that there were two deaths in the consequence of that study. ...[W]hat happens with certain types of respiratory virus vaccines, you get immunized, and then when you get actually exposed to the virus you get this kind of paradoxical immune enhancement phenomenon. ...[I]t's a real problem for certain respiratory virus vaccines. That killed the RSV program for decades. Now the Gates Foundation is taking it up again, but when we started developing Coronavirus vaccines (and our colleagues) we noticed in laboratory animals, that they started to show some of the same immune pathology that resembled what had happened 50 years earlier.