- I am so thrilled to be joined today
by Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the Gavi Alliance.
- Thank you for having me, Emily.
I'm delighted to join my friends at BCG.
- What do you think is Gavi's secret sauce?
How do you really drive to achieve that impact
that you set out to achieve?
- Well, there's a few things.
First of all, we are a public-private partnership,
and we acknowledge that we need all sectors engaging here.
And that's very important because the UN has a role to play,
obviously governments have a role to play,
civil society does, but so does the private sector.
And it's critical to bring all of those together,
to use innovation, and to constantly try to be
surfing on that edge of innovation
and bringing those tools to help us in what we're doing.
I think the other critical issue is a fanatic attention
to measurement and quantifying what's happening.
And the reason that's so important for us is
we go in, we try new things.
Sometimes they work, but sometimes they don't work.
And without live metrics,
it's very hard to know when to pivot to new things.
And given that we have this mentality
of being public-private,
it's allowed us to test, adjust, test, adjust, test, adjust
to try to get to a better place.
- And speaking of trying new things,
let's pivot to talking about COVAX a bit.
What do you see as some of the accomplishments
you're most proud of,
as well as some of the lessons learned?
- We ended up with 193 countries and economies joining us,
which is extraordinary.
It's the largest collection, gathering of countries
since the Paris Climate Accords.
We had hoped that we would be there.
And you asked me what were some of the greatest
or most proud accomplishments.
To me, the single one was the fact that 39 days
after the first vaccine was injected
in a high-income country,
we had our first injection in a developing country,
and that's never happened before.
As you know, traditionally, vaccines take five to ten years
to trickle down to developing countries.
So we were off to the races very early.
We have commitments of now more than 1.3 billion doses.
And with that,
and the advanced purchase agreements we've done,
we're now delivering at scale.
And actually today,
we crossed the 600 million doses delivered from COVAX.
But what's more important than that number is
we've allocated 1.4 billion doses.
And the challenge now is getting those allocated doses
into countries, getting absorption going in those countries
for what now is the most complex and fastest rollout
of vaccines in history.
- Thank you so, so much.
- Thank you.