Coronavirus: Countries, companies make billions in bets on vaccine

WASHINGTON -In the race to develop a vaccine to end the Covid-19 pandemic, governments, charities and Big Pharma firms are sinking billions of dollars into bets with extraordinarily low odds of success.

Drug companies and the governments and investors that finance them are boosting their"at-risk" spending in unprecedented ways. The overriding consensus among drug company executives, government health officials and pandemic-response experts is that the risks are necessary to ensure not only that a vaccine for the new coronavirus is developed quickly, but that it is also ready to distribute as soon as it's approved.

Many governments are pouring money into vaccine initiatives with expectations that they will be first in line if a viable vaccine emerges. In China, a major global producer of vaccines, the government is backing several coronavirus vaccine projects, raising the prospect it will inoculate its 1.4 billion people first. President Xi Jinping of China has said any successful vaccine developed there will be made available as a global public good.

Sinovac would not discuss how much public money is being invested. The relevant government agencies declined requests for comment. The US on Thursday threw its weight behind one of the fastest-moving experimental solutions to the coronavirus pandemic, pledging as much as US$1.2 billion to AstraZeneca Plc to help make the University of Oxford's Covid vaccine.

The US has also backed projects underway at Moderna Inc and France's Sanofi, fuelling concerns that other parts of the world could fall behind.

Cambodia,Vietnam,Laos,Myanmar Doge the COVID bullet !

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