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In 2015, Bill Gates noted that his greatest fear was a new pandemic like the Spanish flu, which would kill millions of people across the globalized world. Five years later, we are experiencing a public health crisis with the coronavirus.
In a lengthy interview for the Vox website, Gates, who had his name involved in several fake news stories linking him to the coronavirus due to his “prediction,” spoke about how we will get out of this quarantine, how much time is left to having a vaccine. and other topics.
The founder of Microsoft, who has a health-oriented base, has a plan to fight the virus, similar to what everyone imagines. It comes down to running after urgently increasing the short-term test scale; researching a medium-term medicine; and run on the long-term vaccine.
For him, said vaccine must be complex, but not as complex as the HIV vaccine (which we do not yet have), and closer to that of other recent outbreaks, such as SARS. Most importantly, he thinks it is “very likely” that billions of people will be vaccinated within two years.
Check out the best excerpts from Bill Gates’ interview with Vox:
Criticisms of current serological tests:
The false positive rate in this serological test is very, very high. Statistically When you have a group where 98% have certainly not been infected, false positives completely overload official data
Innovations we need to reopen countries and companies:
You need to scale up the tests, where you can test everyone before boarding a cruise ship or in a theme park or shed. We are far from that. (…) I’d also put contact tracking on that because it can reduce infections. Then you have medicine therapy. And finally there is the vaccine.
About medications:
A medicine is easier than a vaccine. (…) They have compounds in particular that seem very promising. There is one where you look at the blood of recovered patients and find the best antibodies. And then you use that blood directly or you make the antibodies. (…) We are trying to do well until the end of the year
Difficulties in manufacturing the vaccine:
For some vaccine constructions it is difficult to increase manufacturing because it is too young or because the chemistry is complex. And we are in a new regimen where you talk about making billions of vaccines. We don’t make billions of vaccines at all. We make hundreds of millions, but for those we had decades of work on efficiency
Probability of vaccinating billions of people.
It is very probable [que sejam vacinadas bilhões de pessoas em dois anos]. The goal is not as difficult as HIV. This means that the protein is not changing its shape as much as that of HIV. For Sars we had a vaccine and then the disease disappeared. We even have an antiviral for Ebola. So I don’t think coronavirus is an impossible target, but I can’t guarantee that
Different approaches to the vaccine.
Most of the new vaccines are subunits, where all the virus is not inserted. You only get parts of it, like the main protein in the coronavirus case. (…) You only need to make RNA, which is trivial because it’s just the known codes that assemble together. If it works, this will be the platform for quick responses in future pandemics
On the “prediction” of a pandemic with 33 million deaths
We really don’t know what will happen in developing countries, where the majority of the population lives. The cases reported from these countries so far are very small. But, unless there is a magic factor, the probability that most deaths occur there is very high.
Why are developing countries like Brazil not doing as badly as they imagined?
I hope there are reasons that are not: that they simply are not evaluating many people, or that people are afraid to look for evidence, or that people who travel the world are separated from the majority of the population and therefore , spreading the disease to a slum worker would take an additional month or two
What you don’t know about covid-19 and would like to know
Seasonality and climatic effects. It seems that indoor transmission is an important part of the infection, and that the way our indoor circulation works, like the subway, works against it.
(…) We still don’t know what the human immune response is like. This is very important because if it is weak, then it is not protected from a second infection. I don’t think it’s likely.
Fear of a second wave in the United States with a reopening
I am very concerned about that. Unless you are very gradual and choose the things that we know will not increase the infection rate, you will have heterogeneity in which parts of the US. USA They will be good and others bad. The temptation to avoid traveling between these parts will be very difficult. Without evidence, the reopening is somewhat blind. I hate to talk about it again, but where is the prioritization of evidence?
About test prioritization
Some people had access to tests without symptoms and some people with symptoms did not have access to tests. So a substantial percentage of the tests don’t help. It is almost corrupt that if you have a close relationship with a doctor in the hospital you will have access to the PCR machine regardless of the circumstances. (…) It is difficult to understand why people are not angry about this
On the surveillance of technology companies.
Classifying this is complex. Some are to help you remember where you have been. So if they interview you, you can remember: ‘yes, I went to that store, that other store’. This can help.If you only use bluetooth, the distance is too big, so the false positives will be huge. (…) But Germany’s approach, which requires human power, can work very well. If that database is managed properly, it doesn’t affect privacy as much as some of the Asian approaches do.
Expect a future in five years, with vaccine
I hope it brings the world together. After World War II we created new institutions and succeeded in avoiding another war. That was phenomenal. We do not exploit a nuclear bomb as part of a conflict. And we did it by joining through institutions, since the WHO is for health. So, as bad as it was, we had positive results
What else should we prepare for?
Things are difficult enough already. I don’t want to dwell on bioterrorism, but whatever the current death rate is, it’s not close to bioterrorism: smallpox or another pathogen that was intentionally chosen for a high death rate
On the coronavirus conspiracy theories
It’s kind of sad. Who would have thought that Lysol (manufacturer) would have to remind people not to take disinfectants? Some people actually act on fake news. Disinformation is dangerous, particularly in this type of crisis where people are more willing to believe absurd things.
