Baylor's National School of Tropical Medicine... includes as its research arm a... product development partnership (PDP). There are 16 PDPs worldwide… - Peter J. Hotez

So we have a vaccine now in clinical trials, a vaccine that we hope will advance to the clinic soon, a Hookworm vaccine in clinical trials, a new vaccine that's moving into the clinic. I like to say that these are the most important diseases that you've never heard of. These are some of the most common afflictions of the world's population, but they mostly occur among people who live in extreme poverty... [S]o there is no model to figure out who's going to pay for them. So as a consequence, neither the biotechs nor the big pharmaceutical companies make those vaccines.

In 2006, I became founding editor in chief of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a then new journal for a growing community of scientists and public health officials committed to studying the (NTDs). ...I became deeply impressed with the number of papers reporting on disease findings in middle-income countries, and even in some high-income countries. This... combined with my personal experiences after moving to Texas and seeing first-hand the endemic tropical diseases, inspired me to look more deeply into the health disparities of the poor who live in the midst of wealth. ...Many of the findings in this book are based on data and information published in [the journal].

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.