Bill Gates is working to fix a surprising problem hindering a COVID-19 vaccine: finding enough glass vials

• Bill Gates has not only been warning the world for years about the possibility of a pandemic, his charitable foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to prepare for one. But he's not feeling like a visionary.
• He feels "terrible," he told The Wall Street Journal, because he feels like COVID-19 shows that his warnings went mostly unheeded.
• Now he's in the middle of the race to find a vaccine, and the Gates Foundation has dedicated $100 million to fund COVID-19 research, including vaccines.
• But, he warns, even when the vaccine has been developed and approved, which he estimates will take 18 months, there are other practical issues to solve so it can be quickly distributed to everyone.
• This includes simple things, like sourcing enough glass vials to get 7 to 14 billion vaccines made.
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Bill Gates is entitled to tell the world a great big "I-told-you-so" as he's been warning governments and the public about the threat of a global pandemic for decades.

In fact, as recently as 2017 at the Munich Security Conference in a fire-and-brimstone speech about how ill-prepared the world was for a "deadly pandemic," he announced yet another effort to get everyone focused on it: the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

That year's budget for his charitable foundation shows 7% of its nearly $1.3 billion global health budget was dedicated to vaccine development — nearly $90 million.

But Gates is not feeling like a visionary.

"I feel terrible," he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal's Betsy McKay. "The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage."

With 4.1 million COVID-19 cases confirmed so far and trillions of dollars of economic damage done, this wasn't the safe, soft landing Gates was hoping for.

On top of that, he says that the pharmaceutical industry has never developed a new vaccine in less than five years, although he's hopeful that a COVID-19 vaccine will be widely available in about 18 months.

As one of the people who has been studying this issue for years, Gate's foundation has dedicated $100 million to fund efforts to improve detection, isolation and treatments of COVID-19.

But even when one or more vaccines prove effective, Gates says that he's working with the pharmaceutical executives on solving other, more practical hurdles that could hinder vaccine distribution, finding enough glass vials.

Even something as simple as that isn't easy when talking about an immediate need on a world-population scale. "Nobody's ever made 7 billion vaccines," Gates told the Journal.

Not that Gates is the only tech billionaire working on COVID-19. Amazon's Jeff Bezos says Amazon is spending $1 billion to create its own COVID-19 test. The charitable foundation of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his medical doctor wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, is contributing $25 million to an accelerator run by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for finding treatments for COVID-19. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is also contributing to other coronavirus-related causes.

But the Gates foundation is a heavyweight at the meetings between pharma executives, governments, and researchers via that coalition set up in 2017, including at one meeting held on May 4.

And this time, Gates knows that the world is listening.

Here is Bill Gates explaining how vaccines are made and the status of the race for a COVID-19 one.

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