WASHINGTON, Dec. 13 (Sputnik) - American philanthropist and billionaire Bill Gates, who together with his wife Melinda has invested heavily in COVID-19 research and testing, pledging that anti-coronavirus vaccines should be available to “everyone”; earlier he addressed conspiracy theories undermining his motivation for the development and distribution of anti-virus vaccines.

Ahead of the start of the US anti-coronavirus vaccine rollout, American business magnate, software developer, and philanthropist Bill Gates has volunteered to take a COVID-19 shot publicly.

"I will visibly take the vaccine, because I think that it's a benefit to all people to not be transmitting," said Microsoft's billionaire co-founder, talking with CNN's Jake Tapper on State of the Union.

​The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier authorised the Pfizer/BioNTech two-dose COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use in the country, with the first batch of the vaccine expected to be delivered across the US during the week.

Bill Gates also denounced President Donald Trump's "America first" approach to coronavirus vaccine development as "selfish", underscoring that US vaccines had only benefited from collaboration with foreign scientists.

Underscoring that German biotechnology company BioNTech was behind the creation of the COVID-19 vaccine authorised by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week, Gates said:

"We want the world economy to be going. We want to minimise the deaths. And, you know, the basic technology is a German company. And so blocking international sharing and cooperation has been disruptive and a mistake during this entire pandemic."

US federal vaccine initiative Operation Warp Speed (OWS) 's role in advancing the development of an American jab was downplayed by Bill Gates, who emphasised that the first two inoculations made from messenger RNA, known as mRNA, have had "backing for quite some time."

The American billionaire added that Pfizer and Gates Foundation partner BioNTech "did not take government money".
As for Moderna’s vaccine, which according to Moncef Slaoui, head OWS scientist, will likely be approved by next week, it received financial support earlier, when the US inoculation initiative was "just called BARDA", or Biomedical Advanced Research and Development.

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a public–private partnership initiated by the US government to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.

As Gates lauded international scientific efforts to aid the development of the first US vaccines, he was emphatic that distribution should be "based on medical need, not wealth at all".

"We need to ramp up the capacity of all the vaccines. There will be some additional ones approved in the months ahead that are easier to scale up the manufacturing. But the US has benefited from other countries' work here, and we shouldn't be entirely selfish in how we go forward," said Gates.

Questioned on Donald Trump's executive order, signed in line with the ‘America First’ policy during a summit on Operation Warp Speed and prioritising distribution of the vaccines to Americans before other countries, Bill Gates said that “all of humanity” should be helped amid the health crisis.

“The extreme idea that everybody should die until we have the very last American vaccinated, that's hardly the appropriate response," noted Gates.

The Trump administration said on 8 December that it was confident the US will have enough doses of vaccine to inoculate everyone who wants it by mid-2021.

While stopping short of clarifying how it will be enforced, the executive order sets up a framework for US government agencies to help other countries procure the vaccines after domestic demand has been met.

Bill Gates refused to single out any of the vaccines. "I'm super happy with all of these vaccines," said the tycoon, in reference to the vaccines produced by Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca.