A group of governments and donors including US philanthropist Bill Gates - have pooled 460 million dollars to fund vaccines for new epidemics, they announced Thursday at the World Economic Forum, according to dpa. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations aims to shorten the time it takes to develop new vaccines, and to stop outbreaks from turning into global health emergencies, such as Zika did last year. The initial funding comes from Germany, Japan and Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, a British research charity. The new fund plans to focus on Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Lassa fever and the Nipah virus infection by funding two vaccine candidates for each disease. The funding coalition appealed to other donors to increase the fund to 1 billion dollars. "Ebola and Zika showed that the world is tragically unprepared to detect local outbreaks and respond quickly enough to prevent them from becoming global pandemics," Microsoft founder Bill Gates said.
