(updaite) Bill Gates said Friday that the risks of serious disease from Covid-19 may have “dramatically reduced” but another pandemic is coming soon.
“We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time,” Gates said.
Gates also admitted that natural immunity from Covid-19 infections has done a better job than vaccines.
The virus itself, which creates a level of immunity, and has “done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”
“The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure,” he said.
Gates said it was already “too late” to reach the World Health Organization’s goal to vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. Currently 61.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
He added that the world should move faster in the future to develop and distribute vaccines, calling on governments to invest now.
“Next time we should try and make it, instead of two years, we should make it more like six months,” Gates said, adding that standardized platforms, including messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, would make that possible.
“The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not that large. It’s not like climate change. If we’re rational, yes, the next time we’ll catch it early.”
Speaking to CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference, Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said that the next pandemic will likely come from a different pathogen to that of the coronavirus family.
But he added that advances in medical technology should help the world do a better job of fighting it — if investments are made now.
However, Gates said that in many places that was due to virus itself, which creates a level of immunity, and has “done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines.”
“The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure,” he said.
Gates said it was already “too late” to reach the World Health Organization’s goal to vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. Currently 61.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
He added that the world should move faster in the future to develop and distribute vaccines, calling on governments to invest now.
“Next time we should try and make it, instead of two years, we should make it more like six months,” Gates said, adding that standardized platforms, including messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, would make that possible.
“The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not that large. It’s not like climate change. If we’re rational, yes, the next time we’ll catch it early.”
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(updaite) Bill Gates has warned that people should not get too comfortable returning to their normal lives as a new, more deadly pandemic is coming.
During Germany’s annual Munich Security Conference on Friday, CNBC’s Hadley Gamble asked Gates, “How confident are you that we, as a global community, will deal with the next global pandemic better?”
“Well, there were a lot of people after the Ebola epidemic who were talking about what needed to be done, and in this pandemic, the countries that had exposure to SARS-CoV-1 were amongst the outliers,” Gates declared.
Gates went onto praise Australia’s authoritarian crackdown on civil liberties during the pandemic, and urged other nations to adopt the same approach in the future.
“So, Australia is a true outlier,” he said. “They orchestrated diagnostics, they executed quarantine policies and they have a death rate in a different league than the other rich countries.”
“We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time,” Gates boasted.
Infowars.com reports: Regarding Australia’s drastic and inhumane Covid measures, Gates noted, “Everybody had the capability to do that. They have less PCR machines than other rich countries, they have more travelers coming from China than other countries.”
The Microsoft co-founder cited the millions of deaths, the economic toll, lack of schooling, depression, overdose deaths and other negative effects of lockdowns as results of Covid, not government policies.
Gates claimed, “The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not super large,” adding, “It’s not like climate change where you know 10 trillion, 20 trillion, these are big numbers.”
According to Gates, “Global surveillance capability would cost a billion a year. The RND that we need to do to get magic vaccines and diagnostics and therapeutics, you know that’s less than 100 billion over the next decade. So, if we’re rational then yeah, we’ll catch it early and it won’t go global like it did this time.”
During another segment of the Munich Security Conference, Gates argued that wealthier nations shouldn’t have been pushing the experimental Covid jabs on children who are in less danger from the virus before they got the shots into the elderly populations of poorer countries.
“It’s hard to get the vaccines allocated according to that risk ordering, which would have been ideal,” he said. “Because of the Second Source deal that we helped fund with Serum and AstraZeneca, India actually had a lot of vaccines very early. And, you know, the rich countries had vaccines early.”
Gates’ solution to the dilemma of prioritizing vaccinations is to have the capability to produce 2 doses of a vaccine for every person on the planet.
Asked whether or not it’s possible to prevent the next pandemic, Gates again focused on Australia, saying if every nation did what they did then we wouldn’t be calling it a pandemic.
Basically, unless every nation on the planet becomes a totalitarian hellhole like Australia, we will surely have another global pandemic on our hands despite the fact that Covid was the first one since the 1918 Spanish Flu.
In a bizarre comment, Gates said it was “sad” that the Omicron variant was able to act as a natural vaccine by getting out to the world’s population faster than the experimental vaccines.
“Sadly the virus itself particularly the variant called Omicron is a type of vaccine, creates both B cell and T cell immunity and it’s done better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines…” he explained.
When a panel member asked Gates about face masks, he sarcastically mocked those who don’t want to wear one, saying, “It’s got to be tough, you know, you have to wear pants… These societies are so cruel. Why do you have to wear pants, I’m trying to figure it out.”
See the full conference discussion below:
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Speaking on Friday during the Munich Security Conference, Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder and chairman, discussed how the threat posed by the COVID pandemic had "dramatically lowered"...while making a startling admission: that natural infection and spread was more effective at bolstering human immunity than vaccines.
Speaking to CNBC's Hadley Gamble during the annual conference in Germany, Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told the audience that a potential new pandemic would likely stem from a different pathogen than that belonging to the coronavirus family (maybe Ebola, perhaps?).
But he added that advances in medical technology should help the world do a better job of fighting it - if investments are made now.
"We'll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time," Gates said.
Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, Gates said the worst effects have faded as huge swathes of the global population have gained some level of immunity.
Its severity has also waned with the latest omicron variant.
Amazingly, after years of denial, Gates seemed to acknowledge - albeit in a roundabout way - that the infectiousness of the omicron variant had played the key role in boosting human immunity to SARS-CoV-2.
According to Gates, it's already "too late" to reach the WHO's goal to vaccinate 70% of the global population by mid-2022. Currently 61.9% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine) but that's okay, however, Gates said, as in many places, the virus itself, which creates a level of immunity, and has "done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines."
"The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure," he said.
Finally, Gates insisted that the cost of being "prepared" for the next pandemic wouldn't be that difficult. For instance, Gates said, having a mutable mRNA vaccine platform is one way vaccine-makers might be able to prepare themselves.
"The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not that large. It's not like climate change. If we're rational, yes, the next time we'll catch it early."
He added that the world should move faster in the future to develop and distribute vaccines, calling on governments to invest now.
"Next time we should try and make it, instead of two years, we should make it more like six months," Gates said, adding that standardized platforms, including messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, would make that possible.
Despite becoming an object of public scorn during the pandemic, Gates and his foundation are undeterred: the billionaire is already plowing millions of dollars into a foundation helping to prepare for 'the next' pandemic.
Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has partnered with the U.K.'s Wellcome Trust to donate $300 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which helped form the Covax program to deliver vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.
The CEPI is aiming to raise $3.5 billion in an effort cut the time required to develop a new vaccine to just 100 days.
The whole operation is amusing since nobody knows what the next pandemic will be.
Or...do they?
