Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $ 25 million to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative to try to speed up ...
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan donated $ 25 million to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiative to try to speed up treatments for the Coronavirus, and this donation is one of the largest to date of rich technology in response to the crisis.
The Zuckerberg (ZZI) Foundation - a charitable foundation founded in 2015 - to give these funds to the Bill Gates Foundation will support its efforts to explore new antiviral drugs that can protect people from disease in the future.
The objective of the project known as "Covid-19 Therapy Accelerator" was to develop affordable Covid-19 therapies that could be distributed widely, and the accelerator would undertake the task of evaluating existing drugs and reusing their current purposes for treating "Covid-19" patients, It is hoped that the accelerator will be used to combat other viral pathogens in the long term as well, and the accelerator will also work with the World Health Organization on this project.
Organizers say the goal is to find a treatment in a time frame that is too short to develop a vaccine, which could take years.
For his part, Mark Susan, the new president of the Gates Foundation, said, "At the moment, we cannot treat the symptoms because there are simply no antivirals that can treat a range of conditions in the same way that antibiotics are treated with a bacterial infection."
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation launched this initiative with a donation of $ 50 million last month, and the donation from the "Chan Zuckerberg" initiative comes second to the volume of donations, bringing the total funding to $ 125 million.
Technology companies are rushing to help
The announcement is one of several efforts by tech giants Silicon Valley to try to help combat the spread of the Coronavirus, which has so far killed nearly 25,000 people worldwide and infected more than half a million people.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of search firm Alphabet, Google, said on Friday that the company would donate more than $ 800 million in funds to produce medical supplies used to combat Covid-19, and the donation includes advertising contracts for government, health and corporate organizations.
Both Netflix and Facebook revealed donations of up to $ 100 million to help the technical community and small businesses, even though some of this money was through in-kind contributions, such as advertising contracts.
Amazon and Microsoft contributed to a $ 2.5 million relief fund to channel resources to organizations working with communities affected by the virus in the Seattle, Washington state, and Apple said it would donate 10 million protective masks to relief efforts in the United States.
Source: websites
