Bill Gates To Spend Billions on Coronavirus Vaccine Development (wsj.com) 113
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said his foundation will spend billions of dollars to fund the construction of factories for the most promising efforts to develop a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus. From a report: Mr. Gates, a billionaire philanthropist who is one the richest people in the world, said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will work with seven makers of a possible vaccine to build these factories. Mr. Gates, who announced the efforts in an appearance on "The Daily Show With Trevor Noah" Thursday, acknowledged that billions of dollars would be wasted on vaccines that won't pan out. "Our early money can accelerate things," Mr. Gates said. "Even though we'll end up picking at most two of them, we're going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don't waste time in serially saying which vaccine works and then building the factory."
Is that for real? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: Is that for real? (Score:1)
Yay prison planet! Totalitarianism will save us all from the wuflu!!
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The prime minister of the UK, who undoubtedly has a fantastic health staff on call, was just put on oxygen and might die because he contracted this - and he's only in middle age. Gates wants people to stay in so they don't DIE. This isn't a cash grab.
People like you spreading crap like that are going to get people killed.
You are not understanding what is happening (Score:5, Informative)
Then he comes in and "saves the day" with his inoculation
That's not even remotely what is happening here.
What is happening, is that he's set up manufacturing of SEVEN (not one) possible vaccine. Whichever one(s) work, then you have capability for bulk manufacturing already set up, instead of waiting to figure out which one works and then set up manufacturing for that...
So it's not "Gates Inoculation", he's just pre-funding factory capacity to fast track production.
Re: You are not understanding what is happening (Score:1, Troll)
I, for one, completely trust a supervillain, widely known for his duplicitous evil nature, to look out for the best interests of humanity!!
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The herd immunity strategy has been debunked. The explanation is like this: COVID is an RNA virus, and as such it has a high mutation rate. It has already mutated, many strands are circulating in the population. The more people are infected, the more it mutates and gets harder to defeat.
Re:Is that for real? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, this. I'm not some huge Gates fan, but what he's doing is seriously important. It cuts the timeline for a vaccine dramatically. It's a shame that it takes a private individual to do this.
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What does broke mean? We aren't broke in the sense that we can send $1200 checks to everybody (or most everybody) in the country. It is a choice of where those resources go. The government certainly could do this with only a small fraction of the other costs. Whether it would be politically palatable or not, is a much bigger question. The amount of wingeing about wasting money building factories that didn't work out would make any politician avoid doing so. No politician wants to be tagged with that even if
Re:Is that for real? (Score:5, Informative)
At its peak (1969) NASA was using 4.5% of the Federal budget, while the military sucked down over 45%. If their budget had remained stable they expected to open the first lunar colony around 1984. Instead NASA gets 0.45% of the budget now, while the military is still officially 45% of the budget (at times it's been 57%) without counting the intel agencies, Black Budget or the VA, and regularly receives out-of-band supplement funding for continuing the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan. One catapulted the world into the modern era of high technology, the other drives us backwards toward feudalism.
The "wasted trillions of dollars" isn't accidental. Policy makers for the Republican Party have been quite open that was the goal. Grover Norquist published on his web site that their goal was to drive the debt so high that there wouldn't be room for anything but the military and debt repayment, he declared they were going to shrink the Federal government to the size where, "I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub."
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$105B out of the $934B goes to veterans. DARPA gets $3B. Playing that off as if it's most of the military budget speaks to your agenda.
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$712 Billion dollar Pentagram budget
$3.5 Billion dollar DARPA budget
Yep, that 0.0049 percent of its budget certainly justifies the other 99.9951 percent of it. I'll go hang my head in shame now.
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Do you really think that other research isn't primarily based around finding new ways to spy on poor people and bomb them?
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If their budget had remained stable they expected to open the first lunar colony around 1984
That was way too optimistic, though.
Re:Is that for real? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it was, but even if they were off by a decade it would still have been far more productive than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia, etc. combined. In my entire lifetime I have yet to see the US military do anything that benefits the Americans, or for that matter humans or civilization in general. (Don't go off about ARPA inventing the Internet, they didn't. They just paid for standardization and documentation of what a bunch of techies were already doing on their own.)
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Complains about lies, then tells bigger lies.
Most of which are funded through payroll taxes and have nothing to do with the federal budget.
Most of which is for past military spending, which means paying that debt off is more...military spending.
Funny how we're broke (Score:2)
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Who is this 'we' you speak for? Do you have a hamster in your shirt pocket?
Re: Is that for real? (Score:1, Troll)
Hurrah for forcing the whole world - literally at gunpoint - to inject crazy chemicals with literally no scientifically valid testing!!
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Seriously, this. I'm not some huge Gates fan, but what he's doing is seriously important. It cuts the timeline for a vaccine dramatically. It's a shame that it takes a private individual to do this.
I'm not so sure about it being a shame. There are finite resources in any organization whether it be governmental or private. And that is in terms of money and personnel. Who's to say what the best use of resources is? Numbers? What scares the largest number of people the most? A disease you or someone in your family has?
I mean diabetes and heart disease will kill many, many more people this year than COVID. If the Gates Foundation can take a load off others and help make a vaccine, then more power to the
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It's a shame that it takes a private individual to do this.
Or you could say thank God there's a country like the U.S.A. where people can get as rich as Bill Gates and invest in this sort of thing. Private individuals can often work with an agility and insight that government agencies lack, particularly agencies that have been around a while.
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Bill hasn't had anything to do with MS in ages. You sound like the orange man bad brigade.
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Gates left Microsoft's board of directors a few weeks ago. Hardly "ages" ago. He hasn't been the dominant voice running the company for a long time, but it's absurd to claim he's had nothing to do with Microsoft.
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Ban anonymous coward posting is a good start. That one week where /. did that several months back was like watching the pollution over a city part and the glorious blue sky was visible for the first time in years. Then they realized the traffic dropped so they came up with this half measure where you can still AC post but need an actual login.
Maybe if some sort of negative voting was enacted on the new AC posts that got tagged to the account and if the account receives say 20 negative votes in a day all p
A lot of bad ideas from Bill Gates lately (Score:3, Insightful)
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The virus stays alive for like 45 minutes on cardboard. It's not an issue. But hey everyone here is a genius.
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Re:A lot of bad ideas from Bill Gates lately (Score:5, Informative)
The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.
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Unless the mail arrives in 24 hours then no.
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"Up to" doesn't mean it usually survives anywhere close to that long, and "detectable" does not mean infectable levels of virus capable of getting someone sick. While nobody can prove that nobody has ever been infected by mail, it's clearly a very tiny risk compared to other kinds of exposure.
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The known survival rate [nih.gov] on cardboard is 24 hours. Does that change your opinion?
The scientists found that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detectable in aerosols for up to three hours, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.
The summary says "detectable", which does not mean infectious.
Farther down, it says that they studied whether it remains infectious, but it doesn't say how.
It's rather odd how it is written up here.
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He wanted to have mailed tests, causing positive virus testers to handle and send mail through the postal system coming in contact with many others mail.
I failed to read where he wanted the testers to sneeze directly on the outside of the packages and not sanitize anything that was used. Also I believe that the tests would be sealed inside the package.
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But this one is alright...
His full time job is addressing public health and he employs really good people to do that. Whether the mail-in tests was an idea he would have pursued to fruition or not I do not know, but I trust him and his staff more than you. As for shutting everything down... good or bad, that's what has happened.
Re: A lot of bad ideas from Bill Gates lately (Score:1)
Only Mephistopheles can save us from the Mexican Beer virus!!
What about spending a billion dollars on effective (Score:2)
We need more research on what medicines in our vast established library of expired patent pharmaceuticals (public domain) are effective antidotes for this virus.
Re:What about spending a billion dollars on effect (Score:4, Insightful)
Viruses don't have antidotes.
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I hear it works better if you use oranges rectally.
Re: What about spending a billion dollars on effec (Score:2)
Especially for future children after the firestorm dies down
Wonâ(TM)t somebody please think of the children?!?!
Re: What about spending a billion dollars on effec (Score:3)
This might be the dumbest comment I have ever read. I could elaborate, but what would be the point?
He has the money (Score:4, Insightful)
Luckily there are another couple of billionaires doing the right thing in these difficult times.
( And Bill knows a lot about viruses)
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**sigh**
So you really don't understand what he's doing. Try re-reading the summary, **HIS FOUNDATION** is coughing up the money now so that manufacturers won't have to "recoup heavy up front losses."
Reading comprehension seems to be a lost art sometimes.
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So.. (Score:2)
Tally your fish when you've hauled in all nets (Score:3)
Sounds nice... how much profit will he make if he can bring a vaccine to market that everyone will want plus some extra to bathe the dog in? Even if his markup is minimal, he could probably buy half of Apple with that.
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Do you not understand how a 'charitable foundation' works?
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Re: Tally your fish when you've hauled in all nets (Score:1)
It is not fraud. Using charitable foundations as for-profit tax shelters is, unfortunately, legal.
There appears to be two types of comments dominating this article. The first is completely cynical of Gates and assumes the very worst. The second assumes that Gates is some type of altruistic saint and the ideal philanthropist.
While Gates clearly does some good things with his foundation, he tends to also structure his giving in a way that he maintains control or profits from the situation. Relying on philanth
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If HCQ+z-pak is 100% effective treatment for COVID-19.
First of all that is a big “If”. There simply isn’t enough data to show that it is effective at all and what the effective rate is. Second HCQ is not candy. There are serious side effects to that drug. Third, HCQ is already being used for other treatments and illnesses. Taking it from current patients to blindly test on coronavirus is not the best move.
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They've already shown in several studies that HCQ+z-pak is highly effective.
Citation Needed.
Who said anything about taking it away from existing patients? *Just make more.*
So with the world on lock down and supply chains everywhere disrupted, you think you can just "make more". It would be the best case scenario if someone could flip a lever to make more without the current situation.
As for side effects, in existing trials HCQ+z-pak was effective at reducing SARS-CoV-2 viral titers to 0 within a mere 5 days. I highly doubt the other side effects would be worse or unmanageable over such a short period.
Citation Needed.
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On second thought, Google it yourself you worthless lump of crap.
You made the assertion; you need to provide the evidence. It’s not my job to verify what you think you read or heard. If the research is as solid as you say you should have no problem finding it. Also why is it you are offended when asked for evidence that you resort to name calling?
Real people are dying and you Hate Trump so much you would gladly see millions die rather than admit a single statement Trump made might be true. Do you see what you have become, the monster you now present to the rest of humanity?
Not once have I mentioned Trump in a positive or negative lights yet you immediately feel the need to defend him. Is this your knee jerk reaction? Defend Trump at all costs
Me: I don’t think there is sufficient evide
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That and hydroxychloroquine can also cause heart arrhythmia leading to heart attacks. I notice Dear Leader and his favorite ghoul aren't volunteering to take it.
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That sounds like a job for when we have competent government again.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (Score:2)
The foundation isn't 100% Bill Gates money. (Score:2)
It has received donations from at least one other, Warren Buffet - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not sure if other smaller contributions to the foundation have occurred or not.
I wonder if the other 5 factories get repurposed if not used? What does all that pay for? I would think a lot of off the shelf hardware that can be sold or used for some existing vaccine production?
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Converted to the successful formula.
So there should be no billionares, right??? (Score:2)
Who can do for mankind what others including government that can't or won't.
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Bill Gates got his billions through crime.
Just like the other billionaires.
President Gates (Score:1)
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No, he's just trying to do penance for having sold his soul years ago.
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The $80 bucks I gave Bernie Sanders had a bigger impact on my life than this will on Gate's.
You went without your bag of dope for an entire week? Or do you toke up a lot more than that and it was only a two day sacrifice?
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You know you can stop them from doing that (Score:2)
The mentality you have was put in your head by billionaires who want to convince you not to take part of government so that you will give them a monopoly on it.
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"governments didn't have any money to fund it themselves"
No, they had the money, what they lacked was the intelligence to understand the scientists and the will to act.
That is patently false (Score:2)
Can we stop distrusting experts? This is a bloody science & technology site for God's sake (ok, maybe not for God's sake... that wouldn't make much sense in the context...).
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Only the crazy luddites are left on /., I just come here to laugh at them.
Even failed attempts keep researchers employed (Score:1)
Operating Systems (Score:2)
Imagine (Score:1)
OMG imagine a Beowulf cluster of these factories !!
Mandatory Vaccines (Score:1)
BMGF should fuck off (Score:1)
so short sighted (Score:2)
Instead, he was looking at developing his own nuke, but only if it was in China. Here in America, he quit spending. He could have gone to Canada and still avoided the regulations here.
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At the end of the day, it's still an entitled western asshole pretending the problem is poor people having too many babies, and not average Americans using 30 times [nytimes.com] the amount of resources as a person in a developing country. And that's an average American - how many thousands of poor brown people do you have to put together to equal one American oligarch like Gates.