Bill Gates: It's Not Too Soon To Start Thinking About the Next Pandemic (linkedin.com) 124
Bill Gates and Melinda Gates write in their annual letter, shared by reader cusco: To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war. The world needs to double down on investments in R & D and organizations like CEPI that have proven invaluable with COVID-19. We also need to build brand-new capabilities that don't exist yet. Stopping the next pandemic will require spending tens of billions of dollars per year -- a big investment, but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to cost the world $28 trillion. The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths). I think of this as the best and most cost-efficient insurance policy the world could buy.
The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge. If you live in a rich country, it's in your best interest for your government to go big on pandemic preparedness around the world. Melinda wrote that COVID-19 anywhere is threat to health everywhere; the same is true of the next potential pandemic. The tools and systems created to stop pathogens in their tracks need to span the globe, including in low- and middle-income countries. To start, governments need to continue investing in the scientific tools that are getting us through this current pandemic -- even after COVID-19 is behind us. New breakthroughs will give us a leg up the next time a new disease emerges. It took months to get enough testing capacity for COVID-19 in the United States. But it's possible to build up diagnostics that can be deployed very quickly. By the next pandemic, I'm hopeful we'll have what I call mega-diagnostic platforms, which could test as much as 20 percent of the global population every week.
The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge. If you live in a rich country, it's in your best interest for your government to go big on pandemic preparedness around the world. Melinda wrote that COVID-19 anywhere is threat to health everywhere; the same is true of the next potential pandemic. The tools and systems created to stop pathogens in their tracks need to span the globe, including in low- and middle-income countries. To start, governments need to continue investing in the scientific tools that are getting us through this current pandemic -- even after COVID-19 is behind us. New breakthroughs will give us a leg up the next time a new disease emerges. It took months to get enough testing capacity for COVID-19 in the United States. But it's possible to build up diagnostics that can be deployed very quickly. By the next pandemic, I'm hopeful we'll have what I call mega-diagnostic platforms, which could test as much as 20 percent of the global population every week.
Lesson 1 (Score:2)
... the second wave will be much worse, so DON'T OPEN UP UNTIL ITS ACTUALLY DEAD!
Always fighting the last war (Score:2, Interesting)
Next one should be meteor preparation.
Re: (Score:2)
Next one should be meteor preparation.
The last few "once in a century" meteors killed no-one, despite the atomic-bomb levels of energy. There is only one possible record in history of mass deaths from a meteor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Volcanoes, for example, are many orders of magnitude more of a threat, and pandemics are orders-of magnitude worse than that.
Re: (Score:2)
You "forgot" that the dinosaur got killed by a meteor, and that most likely the "3rd" of the biblic floods was caused by a "meteor" hitting Greenland.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
ya.
excellent spokesperson.
and court records show it.
from the mouth of the person that lies cheats and steals.
Insurance is the key. It's even in the summary. (Score:1)
And no, I'm not surprised that there's no early mentions of the topic in this Slashdot discussion, but insurance is the standard, dare I say capitalist, way to deal with risk. Only slightly complicated by having two primary risks on the table here.
However, for this reply I'm going to skip over the medical risk (because that insurance is more complicated and has a track record of failure) and focus on economic risk (where we've had more success). In particular, imagine that the governments of the world had a
Re: (Score:2)
the biggest crises are unpredictable. Consider the bank crash of 2008 as an example.
What??? Absolutely everyone with any brains predicted it, and the people who created the mortgage mess were counting on it happening since they were shorting the very same fraudulent securities they had created. The new US administration kept on the very same Goldman Sachs alumni who had been suppressing news of the danger to help funnel those funds into the "correct" hands. There was absolutely nothing "unpredictable" in that entire situation.
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm... I can't decide if I disagree with you more on your attitude or your factual errors. Guess I'll stay with the facts. Your use of "everyone" is erroneous, though there were some people who could see the obvious. Your use of "nothing" to modify "unpredictable" is also wrong, because the precise timing of the crash could not be predicted. Nor could it be predicted that the politicians would decide to draw the line with the insurance company rather than with Lehman Brothers.
Re: (Score:1)
Hmm... Using cheap pedantry to evade the subject, eh? GP is correct, you are not
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-1
You have the only bot on Slashdot? (Score:1)
Pretty primitive compared to what's out there. You should try the real bots that can converse. You'll have more fun
Anyway, as usual, last word to you and your bot.
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-3
Your bot is as funny as a fart (Score:1)
And I just happen to think farts are funny
Public masturbation of 1673220 (Score:2)
Z^-4
Re: (Score:2)
Insurance doesn't work for large disasters and usually has notices about that and even if it did cover the businesses that had to close or reduce their business, there's still the actual people who lost their jobs, not to mention the ones that seem to have permanently lost their health.
Re: (Score:2)
What do you not understand?
Let me clarify one minor wrinkle, though it's still obvious. Insurance (even with time reversal) should not cover 100% of the damages. If it did, then companies would not have any incentive to avoid the disasters. You want to adjust the coverage and deductibles properly, though in the case of post facto insurance the government will be negotiating the terms of coverage.
But in terms of filing a damage claim, the business has to keep the employees on the payroll or adjust the amount
Re: (Score:2)
So what you're saying is to use the insurance companies as intermediaries between the government and private business? I guess with the right motivation it might work and enrich the insurance companies with fees. I guess the trick would be to make sure the market is competitive as businesses such as insurance prefer taking the easiest most profitable route.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, that is roughly my suggestion.
Here's one aspect for the employment thing. The companies should be required to file much smaller claims if they lay off their employees, so it is to the companies' advantage to keep the employees on the payroll (and off of unemployment insurance). But you can also allow them to file somewhat larger claims as they redirect employees into new lines of business that create more revenue.
Basically the ceiling is 100% coverage. You don't want to pay at 100% or above of the dama
Re: (Score:2)
But what if the response was converted into insurance with a time trick? Take the Covid-19 crisis as an example. What if the affected businesses could just file claims with their insurance companies to cover most of the damages? The insurance companies are supposed to be experts in evaluating valid claims and quickly paying them. With what money? With the money that the governments are borrowing anyway, but now directed at the ACTUAL damages caused by the medical crisis of Covid-19. Having loaned the money to the insurance companies, the insurance companies will pay the loans back by using premiums paid by the governments from future tax revenues after we're past the crisis. Everything cancels out over time.
So you think the government should pay huge sums of money to private insurance companies year after year so that when a pandemic hits, businesses can file claims with these private insurance companies and they will quickly pay "most" of their damages?
Whatever it is you're smoking, I want some.
Public masturbation of 3493987 (Score:2)
Z^-2
Happens naturally. (Score:5, Informative)
Wake up, sheeple, look at what infectious diseases Anthony Fauci has funded for gain-of-function research
Can you please stop copy-pasting that gain of function crappy argument?
Two big counter arguments:
- Right now, in the current pandemics, thanks to convergent evolution, you see multiple independent variants emerging (B1.1.7 / UK, B501.V2 / SA, P.1 / BR, P.2 also in BR, etc.) each managing to indepedently come up with its own unique combo of mutation that renters it much more effective at contamining +/- some antibody evasion.
Virus evolve naturally. A virus managing to get better at infecting human is something that happens every now and then without even needing the existnce of lab (again, we oberved now in real-time this happenning in the wild). Even more so in a virus that has been detected to infect humans on a regular basis (as studied in farmer on the country side in China) and which every now and then managed to become somewhat efficient at infecting human (remember the first SARS ? Remember MERS ?).
The corona virus familly is plenty capable on its own to come up with something like SARS-CoV-2 no need to invoke some arcane research in the lab. In the 7 year between the discovery of RaTG13 in a mining cave in China, and the discovery of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, the virus would have been totally able to come up with these mutations on its own, specially in the country side, in region that have seen massive expansion of human settlement, encroaching into bats' natural habitat.
- Gain of function research simply tries to scale down to something inside a petri dish a process which already happens out there. When you do gain of function you're not creating monstruous abomination that should exist and for whose creation's hubris you're going to get punished. You're simply trying to observe in your microscope what is likely happening out door when the animal and human population are in proximity of each other. So even if the hypothesis that the peculiar mutant that eventualy became SARS-CoV-2 was birthed in a lab is true, in the absence of the lab this virus is just as likely to emerge in wide nature all the same. You're just scaling down this "wide nature" to something observable in your microscophe. But the "wide nature" is creating the same variant on its own unaided out there. Sometime it is litteraly the same variants: the furin cleavage site present on SARS-CoV-2 but absent on RaTG13 has been independently "re-invented" by multiple other members of the coronavirus familly. Including MERS. (thanks again convergent evolution).
so the TL;DR version:
- you do not need secret labs to explain the observed SARS-CoV-2
- nature is clearly managing to came up with much worse monsters on its own unaided anyway.
Or another way to look at it:
- even if you burn down every single last lab studing bats coronaviruses, that won't prevent the next pandemic in 2030. SARS-CoV-Next will successfully emerge completely un aided.
DISCLAIMER: I study the evolution by of this fucker by sequencing it (in humans) [bsse.ethz.ch] as my day job.
Re:Happens naturally. (Score:4, Interesting)
The differences between this virus and the original are not the types that would be seen with deliberate genetic manipulations. The University of Toronto looked at the evolutionary history of SARS2, and came to the conclusion that it had to have resided in some other animal between leaving bats and infecting humans. Because of the types of mutations found they think that it resided in feral dogs for several years, probably after eating infected bats.
Re: (Score:2)
That was early on in the pandemic. Feral dogs are no longer suspected [oup.com] as the intermediate host.
But the larger point is most likely still true: there was an intermediate host (or a few) between bats and humans where the virus mutated. Since it has ~ 4% difference from the original SARS-CoV, both share a common recent ancestor.
That host(s) remains to be identified.
Re: (Score:1)
The University of Toronto looked at the evolutionary history of SARS2, and came to the conclusion that it had to have resided in some other animal between leaving bats and infecting humans. Because of the types of mutations found they think that it resided in feral dogs for several years, probably after eating infected bats.
Sorry.
There is no way in heaven or on earth to conclude from a virus mutation in which host it has mutated. That is just utter bollocks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wake up, sheeple,
Quiet, you fool! Never wake the Sheeple! [xkcd.com]
Middle and Low income countries (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Middle and low income countries need to pull their weight too.
A whole legion of middle and low income countries have done better at fighting this pandemic than the US, UK and China.
Re: (Score:3)
Elbonia and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick have reported zero cases. Clearly, the smaller the country, the less susceptible to COVID they are.
Re: (Score:3)
Except for San Merino, with only 33,000 people they have the highest COVID mortality rate in the world.
Re: (Score:3)
Its probably because Elbonia and the Duchy of Grand Fenwick are fictional countries.
Re: (Score:1)
All you need is competent leadership. Latveria has done very well too. Zero reported cases.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Middle and Low income countries (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but that's correlation, not causality.
The issues in the US and UK were about resistance to behaving safely, nothing to do with being a high income country,
Re: (Score:3)
Resistance from who? Because despite media coverage the resistance did not come from the citizens. It came from the government. And it had everything to do with being a high income country (and not being prepared to suffer any economic loss until its too late). The UK is only just now closing its borders.
Re: (Score:3)
The UK is only just now closing its borders.
While the UK was part of the EU it wasn't allowed to close its borders
Canada's Provinces and Territories aren't allowed to close their borders either, the Atlantic region and the Territories (where it was easy to close the borders) did anyways and have done quite well. It takes time for unconstitutional stuff to work its way through the courts and it turns out the courts can be understanding too.
The UK could have closed its borders, and said fuck you to the EU if needed
Re: (Score:2)
Not true. https://ec.europa.eu/home-affa... [europa.eu]
And anyway, there are ways of effectively closing borders without the actual act (such as forced quarantine). Even if Europe disagreed, these things take a long time to pass through parliaments and courts (by which time the UK is gone anyway).
Re: (Score:2)
Middle and low income countries need to pull their weight too.
A whole legion of middle and low income countries have done better at fighting this pandemic than the US, UK and China.
China has been doing pretty good?
That said, things differ between countries.
E.g. most low-income countries have a very different age profile than rich countries. They also have have far less "underlying conditions" - some they don't get as much as they're caused by bad lifestyles, others they die from long before they Covid. As a result, the disease is far less dangerous for these countries.
Rich countries also differ. Some countries are really bad - e.g. the US has legions of brainwashed, cultist idi
Re: (Score:2)
they die from long before they Covid.
First time I've seen that used as a verb.
Re: (Score:2)
Haven't you seen anyone ever co-vid?
As is co-video using Zoom or whatever.
That's still a new verb though.
Re: (Score:2)
they die from long before they Covid.
First time I've seen that used as a verb.
Wouldn't it be nice if Slashdot allowed you to edit posts for spelling, clarity etc., and supported unicode?
Should be "others they die from long before they get Covid". Still not a sentence to make me proud - I really need to shorten my sentences.
Here, I'm trying - somewhat helplessly - to point out that there are diseases which you live with in the rich part of the world that will kill you in a poor country. Thus, the Covid at-risk groups for "young" people in poor countries are smaller.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully you realize that's because the median age in many of those countries was *under* 20 years.
Niger has a median age of 15.4
21 countries in Africa have a median age of 18.8 or lower.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
The median age of the entire continent is under 25.
Re: (Score:1)
Median age of Japan is 48.4, their population density is 347.07 inhabitants per square kilometer, and yet as of today they have a total of 107 deaths from COVID19 in the entire country.
There are ways to deal correctly with a pandemic disease, the US has simply demonstrated pretty much all the ways one should NOT deal with it.
Re: (Score:2)
It might not solve the virus problem, but it would make a lot of rich people richer.
Re: (Score:1)
There is no one U.S. way.
We have 329 million citizens.
That's more than most of the EU combined.
Would you say France and German did things the same way? Spain?
Re: (Score:2)
There's a few factors, Japan is lucky to be an island. Here in Canada, the parts of the country that could isolate from the rest of the country have done much better.
Having a united government and a population that trusts their government is another big plus for Japan, though they do seem to have lucked out at the beginning when they were more interested in keeping the Olympics happening. America and Brazil seem to have done the worst on the good united government thing, both with populists who govern by di
Re: (Score:2)
Middle and low income countries need to pull their weight too.
A whole legion of middle and low income countries have done better at fighting this pandemic than the US, UK and China.
No they simply do not have the same ability to test if they could test in the same numbers US, UK and China I think you will find very different results. There are many countries also who have given false numbers or hide the true numbers
Um... what does that mean? (Score:2)
And moreover, better to fight it over there so we don't have to fight it over here. The Rich countries, being the ones a) blessed with wealth and b). more often than not getting rich exploiting cheap labor in those middle and low income countries should be the ones fronting the bill, both for moral an
The irony, we were thinking about this one (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Well "we" were thinking about this for a certain value of "we": people working in public health, science geeks, and apocalyptic fiction authors, sure. Other people, particularly most politicians, not so much. People were slow to take this seriously, and even now a lot of people are in denial.
But for the time being, it's not just geeks who understand this is important, and it's a good time to really promote preparation. COVID-19 is not really "the big one". It's more like a dress rehearsal. In this moment
What's stopping him then? (Score:2, Interesting)
The reality is that the world isn't anywhere near ready for another pandemic and probably won't be, especially for anything that is considerably more infecti
Re:What's stopping him then? (Score:5, Insightful)
If his idea is so great, he can easily take care of the investment himself.
Not by a long shot. Partly because this is **NOT** the only thing he's working on (the Gates Foundation has a remarkably diverse portfolio of projects), but mostly because he's the first to recognize that he's not a magical oracle and that putting all your eggs in one basket is stupid. Just because the Foundation funds a project doesn't mean that it will be a success, or the most successful, or the best answer, and you'd know that if you read any of his work. They do what they **THINK** is going to work, most of the time it does, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes someone else comes up with a better idea (at which point they generally try to shift gears and support the better idea).
This should have been a worldwide priority project long before a dog ate a dead bat and the virus mutated to infect humans, and it still needs to be a worldwide priority project long after COVID is an entry in the history books.
Re: (Score:3)
I think he is by bringing it up, and being someone they may listen to.
Governments are better equipped to prep nations for this than a few billionaires. He's saying they need to get on it.
Deadly factor (Score:4, Interesting)
especially for anything that is considerably more infectious or deadly than COVID-19. {...} If it were something as lethal as Ebola,
More infectious: yes that's going to be a nightmare.
More deadly: actually nope. Deadly is a limiting factor for a virus. When you entirely depend on a host's biochemical machinery to replicate it's counter-productive to kill said host to fast.
One of the reason SARS-CoV-2 has been so successful at causing an epidemic is that it indeed kills "only 1%" of its victims. Even if 1% of a whole population is still way too many deaths(*), the remaining 99% that don't drop dead can successfully carry it around. Even more so the ~20% asymptomatic among them who don't even realize they are carrying around a virus. Or the additional (roughly) ~10~20% who didn't understand because they don't have clear symptoms or haven't started yet having symptoms.
Compare that with Ebola which killed its victim way too fast. If most of the sick people get inst-killed by turning into a giant puddle of blood, that: 1. Looks gruesome. 2. can wipe out an entire house hold. 3. but will never have the time to reach the village next door.
Contrast that with HIV: you can go years before you develop AIDS and eventually die (if untreated). That leaves plenty of time during which the virus can happily propagate around.
The perfect nightmare of a pandemic would be an airborne HIV-like. Something that is very good at contamination. But which takes years until the patient is killed.
Such a beast has the potential to wipe out human civilization.
Maybe it's something slightly less deadly than COVID-19, but it takes 3 years in order to create a vaccine instead of roughly 1 year.
The 3 years situation isn't likely in the future anymore, thanks to the revolution of mRNA-based vaccines.
By the next pandemic, the question isn't going to be 1 year versus 3 years.
By the next pandemic, the question is going to be:
- "is it vaccinable ?" in which case the vaccine is guaranteed to be available fas (maybe even faster than 1 year, if the technologies continues maturing and if the next pandemic has a few uncontrolled hotspots where it is possible to quickly enrol test-subjects in the study).
- "or is it something that's deeply incompatible with vaccination ?" - e.g.: like diseases which are antibody-enhanced. i.e.: diseases where the virus manages to leverage the antibody to infect white blood cells. (HIV does that among others).
---
(*): this discussion entirely side step another critical point of the current pandemics, but concerning the surviving people: SARS-CoV-2 can fill intensive care units very fast for a very long time. It's much more devastating to the healthcare system than influenza.
Re: (Score:2)
It's much more devastating to the healthcare system than influenza.
And we're only now learning about the long-term effects of people who had only a mild or even asymptomatic case. This is going to be filling hospitals for decades.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that Covid can spread before the victim is even sick, and Ebola can spread after the victim is dead. Some viruses spread through an intermediary, so that the intermediary passes on the infection while the previous victim is safely tucked up in his coffin.
Deadly is not always an issue.
Reg those doms! (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Didn't people learn of the y2k problem.
What happens after the year 10k?
Do you want to have to change all the domains to COVIDnnn.do we really need more TLD's?
cost the world $28 trillion (Score:1)
And Wall Street got half of it over the last 16 months. Make 'em give it back!
And this was 'pandemic light'. (Score:2)
Seriously, this could have been a LOT worse, yet countries like the US are shitting the bed with simple and effective precautions like wearing masks (and instead are dying at rates way above comparable nations..focused on the 'dumb' in 'freedom'.)
Imagine if this was something that had a might higher death rate, which could very well be 'the next one'. (Or even a variant of this one.)
Long-Term Disasters Not Fixable (Score:3)
I suspect that long-term disasters like pandemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor strikes, once-a-century floods, and nuclear power maintenance are not fixable by human beings. If the time scale is long enough, people become skeptical at the warnings/preparations and end them.
The covid-19 pandemic is a perfect example. We had planning that was maintained through multiple U.S. administrations, and then scrapped the year before covid-19 hit by Trump:
How Trump Gutted Obama’s Pandemic-Preparedness Systems [vanityfair.com]
Likewise Japan's tsunami-warning stones [smithsonianmag.com]:
"It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and their grandchildren, but then the memory fades," Fumihiko Imamura, a professor in disaster planning at Tohoku University, told the AP
Re: (Score:2)
We're bad at gambling, but we believe we're good at it. That's also why it's addictive. The probability of the event is low, so you think you can always get through. But the reward when it happens is so abysmally bad that the expectation is negative. So on average, you lose, just like gambling games, but since negative expectation is always counter-intuitive you continue to gamble.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're confusing the reward mechanism that the gambling industry uses with our inability to adequately asses low priority high cost events.
The reward from gambling comes from our ability to forget the minor negative outcomes and focus on the positive events. From a developmental perspective this is a valuable trait because without it we would never get anything done. Unfortunately, for some people the reward for success becomes addictive and their behaviour becomes excessively focussed on receiving
Re: (Score:1)
If you
Hard to find an bona-fide N95 mask (Score:2)
Too bad America didn't have industry making N95's for everyone the last year, and telling them to wear it. Now there's more infectious strains, and it didn't have to be hard to get a good mask a year into this mess. Non-essential businesses will continue to take the hit, due to this awful response.
First year I havnt' had a single Cold. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously- normally have 3-4 colds a year.
No Flu and no colds.
I'm going to continue wearing a mask when shopping and continue using hand sanitizer.
My grandmother, who survived the 1918 flu pandemic, always carried a bottle of alcohol and never got sick. She would sterilize doorknobs and her hands after touching things.
Re: (Score:3)
My grandfather did something similar, he had a bottle of alcohol that he sterilized his stomach with a every opportunity . . .
From Lockdown to Locked Up (Score:1)
Living in Europe here. It all started all too reasonable: in order to prevent hospitals not being able to take care of the flood of patients the people were asked to help spread the Corona virus. Gruesome images of dying elderly spread a fear faster than even the virus could keep up with. Now, not one year later I'm locked up in my own appartment with many collegues and friends saying it's for our own good.
If you haven't already, I sincerely hope you don't fall for the trap. They only way out of this is acc
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And now you're averaging over 500 covid dead each day [worldometers.info]
What a great idea that was...
The big fallacy here is that you are led to believe that death can be prevented. People have always died and will always die. And there will always be fluctuations in the numbers of deaths. It's not that half the population is dying. And yes, since spaces get more crowded the fluctuations might increase. But it's up to you, do you want a happy free life with a natural death? Or do you want to live in constant fear, restricted by a government that puts 'disease and virus control above all human rights? Since
If history is any guide... (Score:2)
It's way too early to worry much about the next pandemic. We've had three in the last 100 years. The first one (Spanish Flu) was the worst, the second not terribly bad (hardly even remembered), this one (the one in the middle) got the publicity.
If the last century is any guideline, we won't have to worry too much in the 2070-2080 range....
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
A recent pandemic was H1N1 in ~2009.
Re: (Score:2)
We dodged another bullet with Ebola in 2015. That was really close to breaking out of west Africa.
And the astonishing thing is, we invested significant money and effort in teaching the west African states how to contain, how to do test and trace, etc, and showed them from their own recent experience why this was a life-saver
.
.
.
And we couldn't do it ourselves.
The health agencies in these "third world" countries are looking at us in astonishment, incr
Panic Porn (Score:1)
Why (Score:2)
Why pay attention to anything Bill Gates says?
He just parrots other smarter people and plays off his name recognition.
Just like with Microsoft, just absorbed others work, sometimes hired the right people to make it better or prettier and sometimes broke it (but it had the right label so the boss bought it anyway), and sold it off as their own.
Bill's a twit. He didn't even understand his own marketing strategies until his partners explained it to him and couldn't code his way out of a paper bag.
The only rea
Billy and Viruses (Score:2)
Next pandemic is already here. (Score:1)
The next pandemic is already here, Billy. It's a pandemic of authoritarian thought suppression, a new Cultural Revolution of the West.
Bill Gates now has the opportunity (Score:1)
Bill Gates now has the opportunity to put his money where his mouth is, he will be able to help with funding of the vaccine for poorer nations, and with the amount of money he has, he won't feel a thing.
fix (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd be more worried about a 10-15% death rate and a long incubation period. 50% everyone will shit themselves and stay inside at all costs. 10-15% you can still get your deniers and conspiracy nuts claiming it's a big "nothingburger".
Definitely, you see this with Ebola for example. It's scary as hell, blood coming out every hole and everything. But it gets everyone to listen up and take it seriously immediately so it can be stopped pretty easily. In terms of total death toll, covid is already pretty damn bad thanks to its relatively low IFR.
Re:GW Bush (Score:4, Insightful)
The linked article says nothing about any missteps by Obama. I suspect that's misinformation bullshit on your part; citation required.
We know that Obama maintained a panel and a plan that was scrapped by Trump:
How Trump Gutted Obama’s Pandemic-Preparedness Systems [vanityfair.com]
Re: (Score:3)
It isn't misinformation. It's true. It's just inconvenient and doesn't fit the narrative, so CNN et al of course never mentioned it.
Re: (Score:2)
Due to the nature of US politics while pretty much everything that goes wrong is blamed on the president (current or former - no-one's got around to blaming the future president yet, but give it time...) whereas the situation is generally far more complicated.
From the very article you linked to:
"ProPublica reported on April 3 that congressional budget battles in the early years of the Obama administration contributed to stockpile shortages. But the article notes available funds were used not to replenish ma
Re: (Score:1)
There are many sources of information. It isn't widely reported by the mainstream news, as Obama is too highly favored by most of those organizations. Here are a few examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
After the 2009 flu pandemic in which tens of millions of masks were distributed, fiscal constraints imposed by the agency's $600 million annual budget led officials to decide that replenishing a large inventory of N95 face masks was of less priority than stockpiling other equipment and drugs for diseases and disasters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
The H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 triggered the largest deployment in U.S. history of the Strategic National Stockpile, the federal government’s last-resort cache of drugs and medical supplies. The stockpile distributed 85 million N95 respirators — fitted face masks that block most airborne particles — along with millions of other masks, gowns and gloves.
But the stockpile’s reserves were not significantly restored after the 2009 pandemic, in the view of industry and public health experts.
So yes, the lack of preparedness (as in actual, physical preparedness and not plans on paper) started after Bush left office and went on through Obama's 8 years and the first half of Trump's administration. The supply was exhausted, however, during Obama's tenure.
T
Re: (Score:1)
We know that Obama maintained a panel and a plan that was scrapped by Trump:
Ahh yes, a panel. And what was that panel going to do when COVID struck? Tell the president that we need a hundred million N95 masks, respirators and a vaccine, none of which exist? That panel certainly would have stopped COVID dead in its tracks.
Re: (Score:2)
Better to deny responsibilty, point fingers and blame others while having fun listening to wackos.
Re: (Score:2)
That would be interesting, if it were in the article or true.
But.... even if it were true, Covid became an issue 3 years after Trump took office, and Republicans held both houses of Congress for those first 2 years. They had ample opportunity
Re: (Score:2)
That would be interesting, if it were in the article or true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Fact check: Did Obama administration deplete N95 mask stockpile?
Our rating: True
We rate this claim TRUE because it is supported by our research. There is no indication that the Obama administration took significant steps to replenish the supply of N95 masks in the Strategic National Stockpile after it was depleted from repeated crises. Calls for action came from experts at the time concerned for the country’s ability to respond to future serious pandemics. Such recommendations were, for whatever reason, not heeded.
Even Snopes does their best to cherry-pick around this one:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-ch... [snopes.com]
Did Trump Inherit a ‘Depleted’ Stockpile of Ventilators From Obama?
U.S. President Donald Trump repeatedly tried to buck the blame for the “empty cupboards” of federal emergency medical supplies.
What's True
Stockpiles of some types of personal protective equipment such as N95 masks were depleted by the Obama administration’s response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, and had not been replenished by the time the COVID-19 outbreak began.
What's False
The ventilator supply, specifically, was not depleted under the Obama administration, though it did fall short of what experts said would be needed in the event of a severe pandemic.
Re: (Score:2)
So in 3 years the Trump administration wasn't able to order and stockpile any masks? Was that Obama's fault as well?
Re:GW Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
No, President Clinton took pandemics and bio-terrorism very seriously, especially after the CDC wargamed a release of pneumonic plague in (IIRC) a concert hall in Boulder, CO. Within a week the healthcare system of Colorado had collapsed and most of the neighboring states were teetering, antibiotic prices worldwide had skyrocketed, PPE and breathing equipment were impossible to get, and the disease had been detected in Singapore. Clinton rammed legislation through Congress to create "push packs", cargo containers full of drugs, consumables, PPE, and emergency equipment, to be distributed around the country, and put the program under the CDC.
Bush almost immediately canceled the program when he came into office, but some things are too stupid for even a Republican administration to ignore so small portions of it were recreated and placed under "Heck of a job" Brownie's control at FEMA where it was predictably mismanaged. Obama unfortunately did not give it the attention that Clinton had, and under the totally Republican Congress replenishment of supplies was eliminated.
I really detest the Clintons, but I'll never say that they're stupid. Unfortunately I can't say the same about some of his successors.
Re: (Score:2)
Essentially Obama dropped the ball on this one. Not only was funding not renewed, but the Obama administration depleted the remaining supplies stockpiled during the Bush administration.
Citation needed. Let me guess your source is Trump that bastion of truth.
I believe the last of the N95 mask inventory was given out during the Ebola threat.
Again, citation needed.