Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, revealed on Friday that the risk of serious illness caused by the new coronavirus has been "significantly reduced," but the arrival of another pandemic is almost certain, according to CNBC.
Speaking at the 2022 Munich Safety Conference in Germany, Gates said new pandemics in the future could stem from pathogens that are different from the coronavirus family. He added that if investment in the medical sector starts now, advances in technology should help the world better fight it.
Gates said it's been two years since the coronavirus pandemic. As large numbers of the world's population gain some degree of immunity, the worst effects have subsided. Its severity also waned with the appearance of the latest Omikejong variant strain.
However, Gates argues that in many places, this is due to the fact that the virus itself generates a degree of immunity and does a better job of spreading it to the world's population than we do with vaccines.
Gates said: "The odds of serious illness are mainly related to the elderly, obesity or diabetes, and these risks have now been significantly reduced due to exposure to an infected environment." ”
He said it was too late to meet the World Health Organization's goal of vaccinate 70 percent of the world's population by mid-2022. Currently, 61.9% of the world's population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. He said the world should develop and distribute new vaccines faster in the future and called on governments to invest now.
Gates said: "Next time we should try to achieve it in a shorter time, not two years, but in a shorter time." He added that standardized platforms, including mRNA technology, will make this possible.
"The cost of preparing for the next pandemic is not as great, it's not as big as climate change," he said. If we are rational, then, next time we will catch it in advance. ”
Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, partnered with the Wellcome Trust in the UK to donate $300 million to the Alliance for Innovation in Epidemic Prevention (CEPI) to help establish a program to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.
CEPI aims to raise $3.5 billion, reducing the time required to develop a new vaccine to 100 days.
Bill Gates, a big philanthropist, has performed remarkably well during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates and his ex-wife Melinda founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in January 2000 with the goal of curbing the spread of infectious diseases and focusing on global human health.
For more than 20 years, the Foundation has worked to develop inexpensive medicines and vaccine solutions to treat persistent infectious diseases in poor and underdeveloped countries, such as AIDS, polio and malaria.
Gates has also focused on the spread of dangerous infectious diseases and warned several times of future pandemics years before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Let's review the prophecies and opinions made by this great philanthropist.
Back in a TED Talk in 2015, Gates cited lessons learned from the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, the 2014 Ebola outbreak and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak, saying that the United States and other countries were not prepared for a future pandemic.
Gates said: "If something in the future kills more than 10 million people around the world, it is likely to be a highly contagious virus, not a war." It is not a missile, but a microorganism. "
Three years later, in a Chattuck talk in Boston, Gates said the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's continued focus on global health had led him to anticipate an impending pandemic, and he said it might have been triggered by an unknown pathogen that was first discovered.
At the end of 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak .....
On February 28, 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the world's top authoritative medical journal, published a title titled Gates entitled "Responding to Covid-19 — A Once-in-A-Century Pandemic Chinese?" ) article. From a macro perspective, it proposes ways to solve the current epidemic and prevent the next epidemic, and warns that COVID-19 may become a pandemic that has not been encountered in a century, and global leaders should act immediately to strengthen basic health care systems and establish and improve early warning and prevention systems for epidemics. He stressed: "There is no time to waste".
On April 26, 2020, Gates said in an interview with CNN that China has taken many correct measures in the face of the epidemic. He commented on the poor performance of the United States in the fight against the epidemic, believing that the top priority of the United States is not to throw the pot, but to fight the epidemic.
On June 4, 2020, at the Global Vaccine Summit, Gates announced that he would invest $100 million to ensure that early-stage COVID-19 vaccines are affordable for all those who need it. He also said he would donate $1.6 billion to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to provide vaccines to poor countries.
On July 11, 2020, Gates said COVID-19 drugs and future vaccines should be distributed to those who need it most, not "the highest bidder." Gates said an important lesson in the fight against HIV 20 years ago was to build a fair global distribution system that would make medicines accessible to everyone. Citing the 2002 Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria as an example, he said the AIDS crisis was a model for making COVID-19 drugs more equitable and widely available.
On September 21, 2020, Gates said that while he expects vaccine approval to arrive in early 2021 and will see the U.S. begin to return to normal by the summer of 2021, he believes the COVID-19 pandemic will not end until 2022. Gates also expressed disappointment at what the U.S. government has done in response to the pandemic.
On November 23, 2020, Gates was optimistic about the COVID-19 vaccine under study and said that the first two vaccine candidates that could be approved by the FDA came from Pfizer and Moderna, respectively, and their vaccine efficacy appeared to reach 95%.
On June 3, 2021, in a video of the keynote speech recorded for the plenary session of the 2021 Pujiang Innovation Forum, Gates stressed that as long as there are countries that cannot vaccinate their citizens, the COVID-19 epidemic and the difficulties it has caused will continue to exist, the various social and economic gaps faced by low- and middle-income countries will be further widened, and the more dangerous variant of the new crown virus, and even the mutant virus that is not sensitive to vaccine protection, will continue to threaten humanity.
To that end, he called for swift global action to address gaps in access to vaccines. "The World Health Organization has recently included China's COVID-19 vaccine in the emergency use list, which will help bridge the gap in global access to vaccines. China's achievements in the pursuit of health and well-being for its own people and for the world are inspiring. I believe that China's long-term and determined efforts in inclusive innovation will help the world end the COVID-19 pandemic as soon as possible." ”
On November 18, 2021, at the Bloomberg Innovation Economy Forum in Singapore, Gates said that due to the advancement of vaccination and antiviral oral drugs, if the new crown virus does not mutate, the summer of 2022 will be the inflection point of the global epidemic. By then, COVID-19 mortality and infection rates will likely be lower than those of influenza, and countries' economies are likely to recover across the board.