Dhaka, Nov. 20 -- Tech pioneer-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates fears a "dysfunctional" approach to distributing Covid-19 vaccines, despite an inspiring effort by biopharmaceutical companies to produce promising candidates with high measures of protection.

Developing apparently effective vaccines so quickly - especially exploiting a novel approach that uses mRNA to instruct cells to make viral proteins and trigger an immune response - has been "fantastic," Gates said in conversation with Rick Berke, co-founder and executive editor of STAT, a leading publication specialising in the biopharmaceutical industry, during the 2020 STAT Summit. Despite worries about the speed with which companies moved to get there under perceived political pres...