Hyderabad, Dec. 11 -- With a lot of factories based in India - including AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson - in the race for manufacturing a COVID-19 vaccine, they hold an edge for public distribution and supply because of easy scalability, Microsoft founder and Gates Foundation co-chair Bill Gates said on Thursday.

"The good news on this is that if we can get a lot of vaccine factories doing something that has never happened before, which is being a second source, which will get the capacity up, and the trade-off of having such short supply won't be as painful," he said, in an exclusive interview with the Hindustan Times.

For the AstraZeneca vaccine, being manufactured by Serum Institute of India, the Gates Foundation funded $150 milli...