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Medicine

Bill Gates Regrets Not Calling More Attention to the Danger of Pandemics (digitaltrends.com) 118

Posted by EditorDavid from the unheeded-warnings dept.
Digital Trends reports: Bill Gates has been warning government leaders about a global pandemic for years, but the coronavirus still caught nations off guard — and the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder said that's one of his biggest regrets. "I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger," Gates told the Wall Street Journal. "I feel terrible. The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage...."

[C]onvincing politicians to spend vast amounts of money on something that wasn't an immediate threat proved a difficult task, according to Gates.

He told the Wall Street Journal that he regrets not pushing harder.
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Bill Gates Regrets Not Calling More Attention to the Danger of Pandemics More

Bill Gates Regrets Not Calling More Attention to the Danger of Pandemics

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  • Risk Factor 9! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by currently_awake ( 1248758 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @07:45PM (#60068508)
    People are terrible at assessing risk, it's a known issue with the current firmware.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I suppose you think we should piss away billions looking for planet-killer asteroids crossing our orbit too. How about you write the check for it.

      • Uh, we spend only millions on asteroid research... mostly by the guys who protect the satellites that beam TV.

      • Re:Risk Factor 9! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by polar red ( 215081 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @02:54AM (#60069372)

        we spend trillions on a dick waving contest ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the military. I call THAT a waste of money.

        • It's a waste of money until you stop spending it and the King of England walks over and takes your shit.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            the us can do with 25% of what they are spending now.

          • ... Did Elizabeth II suddenly grow a pair of balls?

          • It's a waste of money considering Trump is killing more people that any foreign army or foreign terrorist could ever dream of!

      • Yes we should.

        Because it's not pissing it away. And it doesn't need to be a planet killer to royally screw large portions of mankind for decades. And you say it would only cost "billions" out of our global 86.60 trillion dollar economy?

    • s/risk/long-term risk/

      Our wetware evolved to take care of the near-term risks first. Pick the fruits and escape the lion first, then start wondering why lately it's become much harder to pick fruit or the level of the water in the watering hole has gone down.

    • Re: (Score:1, Redundant)

      by iggymanz ( 596061 )

      Why would a virus that almost always kills those beyond the age humans even lived to for most of history be a concern to our wetware?

      Answer, it wouldn't be. And maybe it shouldn't be. We don't close our economy down for every flu that comes through, not even the bad ones that kill a million.

      • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by ZombieCatInABox ( 5665338 )

        If that's how you think, then I'm sure you'll have no problem directing your grandparents to this post.

        Oh, and make sure you bookmark it for when you're 80, if you make it that old living in your mom's basement on a diet of pizza and coke, having accomplished nothing in your entire life.

      • "We don't close our economy down for every flu" - The problem is that we now have a precedent. Watch what happens with the next flu.
      • YOU FUCKING DUMMY

        The novel part of NOVEL coronavirus is what makes it not like the flu. We don't close things down for the flu because we have antibodies against it and when we don't it behaves in mostly predictable ways.

        Currently, we are facing a virus for which we have no antibodies, natural or artificial. Folks catching the disease are drowning in their own blood and their blood vessels are destroying themselves and clotting blood. This is the immune system "testing" reactions to see what works and s

        • So what's your solution? Hide from each other behind masks, doors, and walls until a vaccine is developed? That's hardly a sure thing. It could take years. It could never come. HIV still has no vaccine, despite it's very high profile, thirty years of research, and the fact that is 100% fatal unless you hold it at bay with crushingly expensive medications for the rest of your life. And yet, people didn't cower hiding from it and each other. Hell, even in the '80s and '90s, when treatments were unavail

  • Wouldn't have made any difference (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @07:55PM (#60068530) Journal

    because no Windows user wanted to hear "Bill Gates" and "virus" in the same sentence anymore.

  • Bill Gates you go straight home and get on your ass-kicking machine.

  • .. wonderful how accurate it can be...

    Especially with the foresight to try to claim you had sufficient amounts of foresight beforehand, after the fact.

    • If I were him my biggest regret would be that I didn't let all these ungrateful dickheads die horribly.

    • Especially with the foresight to try to claim you had sufficient amounts of foresight beforehand, after the fact.

      That's just a universal human emotion. Although in BillG's case though, he also has have bank receipts and TED Talk footage to back it up.

  • Computer "viruses", at the very least, found a perfect target in Microsoft's monoculture strategy [wired.com]. If Bill Gates doesn't take full worldwide credit for calling attention over multiple decades to its clear, present, and continuous danger, he's signalling a wholly false sense of 'humility'.

    Just list the major antivirus vendors and he can consider his responsibility in this matter fully discharged.

  • 640000 deaths ought to be enough for everybody

  • What more was he going to do? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @08:38PM (#60068660)
    He gave a well known TED talk about it among other things. Realistically though, he was probably better off focusing his efforts on malaria prevention and treatment. By the end of the current pandemic it's likely the world will surpass half a million COVID-19 deaths, but malaria does about that many every year and that's down significantly since the time that Gates started getting involved in prevention and treatment efforts. I won't give him sole credit for all of that, and I doubt he'd say any differently, but a lot of lives have been saved due to those efforts.

    People might have applauded him for all of his additional efforts, but I don't think they would have amounted to anything. I can't think of a single thing he could have said or done that would have made a measurable difference. The simple (and sad) fact is that people just aren't very good at dealing with problems that aren't staring them right in the face.

    Realistically, this pandemic is probably about the best thing that could have happened as far as getting most of the world to take pandemics more seriously. It isn't so deadly to completely devastate a nation and even countries like Sweden that took minimal actions and generally relied on people behaving intelligently and implementing social distancing practices didn't have their healthcare system overrun. Compare that with something like MERS or Ebola where the mortality rate is at least an order of magnitude higher and it's easy to see that we're getting off lucky.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      It is interesting. We are going on 250 years since the people of what is now the US and what is still France decided that allowing a few people to accumulate wealth and then decide what was best for everyone was not a productive way to run a society. In france they begin to cut off peoples heads. In the new world colonies, we began to shoot people.

      We find ourselves in a situation where we once again believe that people who accumulate cash, with variously legal enterprises, are the best leaders. Gates

      • He gives more than anyone except Warren Buffet. Get your head out of your butt please.

      • Gates is giving away 95% of his wealth to charity. There is even a movement of which he is part of for billionairs to give their money away https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/3... [cnbc.com] These 14 billionaires just promised to give away more than half of their money like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

        • Call me when that "is giving" turns into "has given" and Gates is still alive and healthy.
          Also call me when the "giving" was without strings.

      • That might be the worst synopsis of that history I've ever seen.

    • he has the money to do both and fund the preparation himself, instead he is pleasing his wife by spending time on birth control (and buying mansions)

    • The simple (and sad) fact is that people just aren't very good at dealing with problems that aren't staring them right in the face.

      ... or problems that only occur on average about once a generation. Everyone was in denial, regardless of political persuasion, right up to the point where it became obvious that COVID-19 wasn't going away.

      It's human nature. And 20 to 40 years from now, it will happen all over again.

  • Bill Gates is not an expert on the subject, why would anyone listen to his opinion on something he's utterly ignorant of? Talk about inflated sense of worth...

    And people are saying he's so wonderful for funding vac facillities, he just wants to inject 7 billion people and get a cut of the action.

    • Bill Gates is not an expert on the subject, why would anyone listen to his opinion on something he's utterly ignorant of? Talk about inflated sense of worth...

      You don't need to be an expert to listen to experts, understand what they say and tell others.
      Just imagine what could have happened if Trump had listened to the experts.

      And people are saying he's so wonderful for funding vac facillities, he just wants to inject 7 billion people and get a cut of the action.

      Cause he desperately needs the cash...

  • after all I am fantastic and I love people of all races even the portugese I think I should get more attention for my opinions

    my biggest regret in all of this virus stuff is that I'm not the hero of the whole world

    • Except you aren't spending billions making the world better, and Gates is.

      We all hate him. Absolutely. But at the very least he's finally taking all the money he stole from everyone and is actually doing some good with it. And I'm ok with him feeling like he hasn't done enough good.

      What else do you want? Him not giving a shit and making a cloud fortress on Venus, filling it with chicks, and saying "fuck all you Earth pleebs"?

  • Given the historically poor handling of safety and the most elementary security of the source of Bill Gates's enormous personal wealth, the man should not be trusted. I'm having difficulty imagining people less suited to give advice about personal or public safety.

  • This dude is a billionaire and our doctors and nurses were caught totally off caught with no PPE.
    Seriously how hard would it have been to stockpile this stuff over the last few years?

    But no his regret isnt that he didn't take action. His regret is that he didnt say more words??? wtf

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by laird ( 2705 )

      Gates spent a fortune improving global health. The reason that the US had a shortage of PPE is that everyone stripped their inventories to "just in time" to save money, then bought everything from China so the US PPE manufacturers went out of business. Then the FDA blocked the import of kn95 masks, which are plentiful globally, so hospitals could only use n95 masks (basically the same spec, but US-specific) which were in short supply because they were all made in China, and China shut down to stop the sprea

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's what happens when you're surrounded every hour of the day by sycophants telling you you are! This is such a common occurrance a warning should be taught in middle school along with basic finance, simple carpentry, and sewing.
    • The code that Gates wrote (at least the parts I've looked at) was pretty good. The biggest criticism you could make is that it was optimized for an era where every byte mattered, not our current era where spending gigabytes for the sake of programmer efficiency is common.
  • The people whining like little angry because Gates wishes he could have done more are also the ones down on their knees sucking off grab-them-by-the-pussy-Trump who wishes he could do less, or even nothing, other then spend taxpayer dollars to play golf. Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK is wrong with these people?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • The problem wasn't folks ignoring danger (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday May 16, 2020 @10:44PM (#60068932)
    everybody knew it was coming. The problem was nobody wanted to pay for it.

    Doesn't matter what the danger is, nobody wants to pay to avert disaster. Nobody gets a ticker tape parade for quietly preventing misfortune. Hell, most of the time they get smeared for wasting money.

    • Yeah, and we have large percent in charge that want to treat running the government like running a business. Not using that pandemic team, fire them. We can always hire them back later. Stock up on masks? We will just get them when we need them. Just in time inventory works for everything else, right?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Expression hate to say it, but I told u so. Probably hate the outcome for which they told u so But they enjoy telling you they told u otherwise they wouldnâ(TM)t. Yeah we got it Bill. Next up Greta in a decade or so.
  • It didnâ(TM)t need to be this way. China knew about this in November 2019(!) and chose to disappear scientists trying to warn. They and WHO assured the world was not animal to human while China was hoarding PPE from rest world via quiet export controls. Let us make sure that never happens again?
  • I regret little Billy didn't pay more attention to producing quality software.

  • Don't blame Bill Gates - he invest in the research, and funded the work to an amazing degree. Blame the specific world leaders who ignored the warnings. Note that not all countries ignored the warnings - APAC generally did a great job reacting quickly and effectively to the threat and came out pretty well, for example, as did many other countries. China wasted some time before responding, then did a good job locking down. The US and UK's failures aren't Gates' fault - the leaders were egotistical morons who chose to ignore their own health experts' warnings, pushing their countries into an avoidable disaster.

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