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Medicine Biotech

Bill Gates Gives TED Talk Proposing New Global Team to Quickly Prevent Epidemics (youtube.com) 118

Posted by EditorDavid from the road-ahead dept.
Bill Gates shares a statistic about the COVID-19 pandemic. "If we'd been able to stop it within 100 days, we would've saved over 98% of the lives." "Viruses spread exponentially, and so if you get in there when the infection rate is fairly small, you can actually stop the spread."
In a new TED talk, Gates argues that we did learn a lot from this pandemic — enough to build a prevention system for next time. "Covid 19 can be the last pandemic if we take the right steps." But the answer isn't vaccines. "We also need vaccines, but we want to stop the outbreak before we have to do a global vaccination campaign." And then Gates points out that currently it could take months to get resources to a low-income country experiencing an outbreak.

Read on for Slashdot's report on Gates' proposed solution — and how he feels about his own prominence in anti-vaccine misinformation.
Bill Gates: "Despite what you see in movies, there is no group of experts standing by to prevent this disaster. So we have to create a new team. I believe we should create what I call the GERM team." [It's an acronym standing for Global Epidemic Response & Mobilization.] "This group is full-time — their only priority is pandemic prevention. It's made of a diverse set of specialists, with a lot of different realms of expertise — epidimiologists, data scientists, logistics experts — and it's not just scientific and medical knowledge. They also have to have communication and diplomacy skills.

"The cost of this team is significant — it's over a billion a year to support the 3,000 people who would be on this team. And its mission is to stop outbreaks before they become pandemics.... They'd work closely with the national teams, depending on the income level. They'd have more in the lower-income countries...

"And a very important thing is that, like firefighters, a GERM team would do drills. When you want to have quick response, when you want to make sure you have all the pieces there, and you can move very quickly, practice is key.That's how you make sure everyone knows what to do...

"They would work with countries to strengthen their health systems [which] are the front line. You need to know if, say, a lot of people show up with a new kind of cough that's when GERM needs to look into it and say, is this an outbreak? Is there a new pathogen here? What is the sequence of that?"


America has 370,000 full-time firefighters , and 9 million fire hydrants, Gates points out. "And so that type of investment, that type of practice, that type of system is what we need to stop pandemics."

And vaccines can do something else that's incredibly beneficial: eradicate entire families of viruses. "Innovative new vaccines, used properly, could get rid of the flu family, the coronavirus family."

Gates underscored the seriousness of the threat, also pointing out that the Covid pandemic "increased the health inequities between the rich and the poor — survival depended partly on your income, your race, the neighborhood you lived in."

But even then, Gates argues, during the last pandemic, "We didn't have the people, the systems, or the tools we need... Now with the right investments, we can have a whole new generation of tools — better diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines." And many of them can even be positioned in advance for future use.

But in a lighter moment towards the end, Gates was asked about his prominence in anti-vax misinformation. "Well, it's kind of weird. Uh...." Gates said — drawing a laugh and then applause.


"Our foundation, the Gates Foundation, is very involved in vaccines, the invention of new vaccines, funding vaccines — and we're very proud that through joint efforts like GAVI, that's saved tens of millions of lives.

So it's somewhat ironic to have someone turn around and say, 'No, [they're] using vaccines to kill people or to make money,' or, you know, we started the pandemic. Even some strange things like that I somehow want to track, you know, the location of individuals. Because I'm so deeply desirous to know where everybody is. [The audience laughs.] I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information.

Does this turn into something where, you know, there's constantly crazy people showing up? Who knows.

Uh, but, you know, hopefully as the pandemic calms down, people are more rational about, 'Hey, vaccines are a miracle, and there's a lot more we can do.'"


Gates also made one very sobering remark:


"When I was on the stage in 2015, I was one of many people who said we weren't ready, and we needed to get ready. We didn't.

"The speech actually was watched by a lot of people. But 90% of the views were after it was too late.

"So now I hope the need is clear."
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Bill Gates Gives TED Talk Proposing New Global Team to Quickly Prevent Epidemics More

Bill Gates Gives TED Talk Proposing New Global Team to Quickly Prevent Epidemics

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  • So (Score:2, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 )

    >So it's somewhat ironic to have someone turn around and say, 'No, [they're] using vaccines to kill people or to make money,' or, you know, we started the pandemic. Even some strange things like that I somehow want to track, you know, the location of individuals. Because I'm so deeply desirous to know where everybody is. [The audience laughs.] I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that information.

    Ohh those naysayers, so silly, ha ha!

    He isn't doing himself any favors when he dismisses valid criticism wi

    • This is the first time that I am aware of that an untested vaccine was shoved down the throats of any civilian population. It's not going well because a large part of the population rightly doesn't want to be human guinea pigs even if the vaccine turns out to be pure awesome sauce for fighting the virus.

      Like the arrogant creep we've known him to be for 30 years, Gates dismisses that. Then he dismisses the implications of yet another vaccine getting whipped up in a 100-120 day period and forced on the popula

      • This is the first time that I am aware of that an untested vaccine was shoved down the throats of any civilian population.
        That is wrong: all vaccines were tested.

        his medical credentials are barely above the average rando in Seattle)
        So is yours, or why the rant above?

    • :) True. He would do the same thing with tracking people that Microsoft does with windows 11 telematics

  • Gates argues that we did learn a lot from this pandemic — enough to build a prevention system for next time.

    People will suspect his efforts will involve micro-chipped vaccinations ...

    • I'd say yes if I was 100% sure it doesn't run windows. I don't want to turn into Clippy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      It's interesting that this is both a case of "telephone game" and probably inspiration for a real thing.
      The original story was that bill gates suggested chipping people (like the regular deal) who took the vaccine so stores could quickly "validate" those people, and the story got distorted until turning into 5G evil microchips (which is quite ironic, given the main problem of 5G is that it is very bad at going thru stuff in general).
      And a bit later after this spread, a lab did indeed created a chip that can

  • Both flu and coronaviruses mutate really fast: the annual flu vaccine is about 3 to 5 of the most common ones that year, the best guess for the worst ones. Sometimes it misses the mark. And it only lasts a year. Coronaviruses also mutate fast. Both of these are not only endemic in humans but animals worldwide and can and do cross the species barrier.

    We ain't eradicating these any time soon.

    Also, yeah cool, IF we could stop it. It took more than 100 days with a lot of work going in figuring out how the damne

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Catvid-22 ( 9314307 )

      Both flu and coronaviruses mutate really fast: the annual flu vaccine is about 3 to 5 of the most common ones that year, the best guess for the worst ones. Sometimes it misses the mark. And it only lasts a year. Coronaviruses also mutate fast. Both of these are not only endemic in humans but animals worldwide and can and do cross the species barrier.

      We ain't eradicating these any time soon.

      The ones that do affect humans tend to be from other warm-blooded creatures. So here's a thought, stop eating feathered or furry creatures or keeping them as pets. Kind of the reverse of kosher. This won't eradicate the viruses, but would at least slow down the evolution of the zoonotic strains that lead to pandemics.

      • Right so to not even eradicate flu and coronaviruses we need both a magic vaccine and a massive, worldwide change in behavior for the entire population?

        That doesn't sound especially practical.

        • Right. It's impractical if implemented by individuals. But so are the personal changes required to slow down anthropogenic climate change and the plastic pandemic. For climate change, even a shift to EVs, which in most cases won't lead to massive changes in behavior, can only go so far. The same with using reusable cups and shopping bags to reduce our plastic waste.

    • Flu shots don't last a year, the effectiveness goes down substantially over the first four months. Instead, they're given once a year, at the start of the most dangerous season for flu transmission.

    • It depends if you can find a target on the virus that doesn't mutate.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Also, yeah cool, IF we could stop it. It took more than 100 days with a lot of work going in figuring out how the damned thing spread. Even with incredibly restrictive lockdowns it STILL spread.

      Yes, let's talk about that shall we? We knew the previous covids were airborne respiratory viruses, so that should have been our starting point. When it spread extremely fast regardless of whatever mitigations we put in place that should be the huge flag that said, "THIS IS AIRBORNE TOO", but for some reason we ignored that.

      For the record, I'm fully prepared to believe our entire medical establishment is really and truly that incompetent, particularly after the last 2 years ( masks work, no they don't!, y

    • Yup, this. Would a "new global team" even know about a sudden new outbreak before it's an epidemic? Would a new global team be able to lock down 100% of the infected population of a local epidemic, without even a single infected person leaving the quarantine area and spreading it elsewhere?

      Total suppression can only work if it's 100%. All it takes is one stray "Typhoid Mary" slipping through the cracks to undo all your lockdown efforts. For all of Trump's idiocy and denialism, there's not much he could have

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      Also, yeah cool, IF we could stop it.

      Wow! The Dunning-Kruger is powerful here. Parent thinks he knows more than Bill Gates about viruses. (Not "virii" - he is equally ignorant of Latin, but tries to show off anyway.)

      The virus *was* stopped - it was eliminated many times in many countries, including China, but they were too late as it had spread around the world and would inevitably return with travellers. If China had applied that strategy early enough, there might have been no pandemic. It could have been contained like SARS-1.

      • Parent thinks he knows more than Bill Gates about viruses.

        Bill Gates has no background in epidemiology or virology. He doesn't even have any background in any biological research whatsoever. I'm not claiming to be an expert, but why do you think Bill Gates is remotely qualified? It's not Dunning Kruger to be skeptical of a someone who has no demonstrated expertise whatsoever in the topic, but does really love the sound of his own voice.

        Not "virii" - he is

        Oh good grief, you've got your knickers in a twist

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          it was eliminated many times in many countries, including China

          No it wasn't. It may have been heavily suppressed (especially if you believe the official CCP "news") but it was never eliminated.

          Do your conspiracy theories extend to countries like Australia and New Zealand?
          Covid was completely eliminated in early 2020, and the only new outbreaks were new strains from known quarantine failures, definitely not from hidden spread in the community.

          I guess you live in a country that failed to take such action, resulting in 1-2 years of living with covid deaths and restrictions. It must be hard for you to accept that some places did much better. In my state, a few weeks of lockdown

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Do your conspiracy theories extend to countries like Australia and New Zealand?

            Depends, do Australia and NZ have independent news organizations? Let's see NZ scores as the 8th best in the world for freedom of the press, Australia 25 and China scores 177.

            https://rsf.org/en/ranking/202... [rsf.org]

            I guess you live in a country that failed to take such action, resulting in 1-2 years of living with covid deaths and restrictions.

            You picked Australia ya nong. They had some of the strictest restrictions for the last two ye

          • For events where we are not sure of the exact mechanisms to predict much, our minds tend to believe all sorts of correlations in a superstitious way. Like pigeons / monkeys fed by a random timing food dispenser always start repeating behaviors that they were doing when they last got food suddenly. So they very confidently do a certain dance they think gets them the food and keep doing it till they get that random timed food. Which proves to them they were right all along !! Similar themes experiments on h

        • I'm not claiming to be an expert, but why do you think Bill Gates is remotely qualified?
          He started learning about his stuff, long long before you did. He is definitely more qualified than your.

          And most of his approaches and proposals are: complete no brainers!

      • The only thing Bill Gates knows about viruses is that even if you deliver a product which is utterly vulnerable to the computer kind, you can still make money through what used to be illegal actions back when we cared more about antitrust than building a panopticon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If we had had vaccines earlier, and a coordinated global response, I think the pandemic would have been a lot less severe.

      • If we had had vaccines earlier, and a coordinated global response, I think the pandemic would have been a lot less severe.

        Quite possible. People have been warning about coronavirus pandemics for bloody ages (I saw an editorial in Nature dated about a decade ago). With that said, the Oxford vaccine process had already been tried on coronaviruses, (MERS, I believe), so it's not even like we went in completely unprepared vaccine wise.

        The vaccines were in the end brought up to scale in record time, but I suspec

  • The reason we didn't this time was West Taiwan. (Score:4, Informative)

    by He Who Has No Name ( 768306 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @03:47PM (#62474496)

    Beijing refused to allow outside help or involvement. They exerted political pressure to protect their image, rather than stop the disease. Remember how in FEBRUARY of 2020, the WHO was still buckling to Chicom pressure and insisting that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of a disease that had already infected 80,000 people, even according to the wildly turd-polished figures released by the Chinese Communist Party?

    The very simple answer is that this plague happened because Xi's priorities were so fucked up and sociopathic, he cared more about staying in power and protecting his image as Supreme Leader than he did about heading off a global pandemic, which, if the research results of the neurological damage bear out, may yet turn out to be a borderline extinction level event.

    If mainland China had a democratic government we would not have the current global plague. Period.

    So Gates is either wilfully blind to that, or he's proposing some form of his Pandemic Response Team that is acceptable to a fascist monster like Xi. Neither are good looks or reasonable arguments.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Krishnoid ( 984597 )

      This group is full-time — their only priority is pandemic prevention. It's made of a diverse set of specialists, with a lot of different realms of expertise — epidimiologists, data scientists, logistics experts — and it's not just scientific and medical knowledge. They also have to have communication and diplomacy skills.

      Right, what we need is more science and medicine. How about a marketing plan from the titan that managed to lock the world into the same re-skinned operating system and office suite for multiple decades? If Bill Gates put together a team that could flex half that muscle, our current pandemic would be on its way out.

      • Science and medicine do not overrule military might. A nation that says "no" to this proposed epidemic response team will stop it in its tracks. Unless you're suggesting that "more science and medicine" requires some power to back it up.

        And of course, whose power do you think that will be?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jpellino ( 202698 )

      We don't know where the next one will originate. Suppose instead of China, a handful of cases started in the US, and there was in place a government that was unwilling to rally the citizens to do what would save a million lives. You might find out... oh, wait...

      • It does not matter which country the lab is in.

        The bat coronavirus happens to mysteriously arise in a city that contains the world's leading bat coronavirus laboratory which is 1500 km from the nearest bats. And the virus has a novel furin cleavage site that is just what that lab had proposed to add to a virus. Reckless research.

        Virologists hate this, because if it was widely accepted then their wings would be severely clipped.

        I thought Gates was pretty smart. But this one is so obvious he should know.

        Fo

        • If mainland China had a democratic government we would not have the current global plague. Period.

          That is nonsense. Bats live nearly everywhere. Especially in cities that the opportunities, e.g. churches, or under bridges etc.

          • Um, it is not about the bats. It is about the Gain of Function research that was done at Wuhan. It is also done in a growing number of laboratories around the world.

            If China had been more open they might have been able to contain this outbreak in Wuhan. But there is no way the chaotic Trump USA government could contain anything once it got there. But that is a secondary point.

            The virus did not simply jump from bats to humans like SARS-1 did. SARS-1 was not very infectious in the beginning, and never be

            • The virus did not simply jump from bats to humans like SARS-1 did. SARS-1 was not very infectious in the beginning, and never became nearly as infectious as SARS-2 which is why it was contained.
              Actually that is the most believed - and most certain hypothesis by scientists of all kind.

              SARS-2 was manipulated in a lab, and probably had its very effective furin cleavage site added deliberately.
              This idea is completely debunked and considered wrong by nearly all scientists.

              No idea why you think you know better.

              h

              • I am always surprised by the passion and arrogance of people that attack the lab leak hypothesis. Are you a Chinese shill, or just someone that believes strongly in authority, or are you a virologist under threat?

                We have the head of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus saying that the lab leak needs further investigation. So hardly all scientists discount...

                And it is blatantly obvious that a lab leak is at least a strong possibility. For a summary see

                http://www.originofcovid.org/ [originofcovid.org]

                I think I know better becau

                • I am always surprised by the passion and arrogance of people that attack the lab leak hypothesis.
                  The lab leak hypothesis got debunked 100 times, probably more.

                  Only idiots like you keep brining it up. Are you a Chinese shill No I'm not.

                  or are you a virologist under threat?
                  There is no serious virologist who believes a Chinese lab artificially constructed a Corona Virus that by accident looks exactly like one transmitted by bats.

                  I think I know better because I have looked at the actual evidence.
                  No you have no

    • Re:The reason we didn't this time was West Taiwan. (Score:4, Informative)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @05:06PM (#62474636)

      False, you liar. Actually the WHO confirmed human-to-human transmission in January 2022. January 21, to be precise: https://twitter.com/WHOWPRO/st... [twitter.com] There were only a few hundred cases by that date. Not even 1000. As far back as January 2, the World Health Organization activated its broad incident management system across all three of its levels (which are country office, regional office, and headquarters).

      The first reported death was January 9th.
      Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Actually it was less than 100 cases. Hardly justifies claiming human-to-human transmission.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        Are you sure it was Januari 2022? That is not very long ago.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by He Who Has No Name ( 768306 )

        Lulz you didn't even have the guts to post the rest of that thread. Watch how they were dancing around the patently obvious because they had field teams inside the PRC and didn't want them to get disappeared from asking actual questions, giving obvious answers, and thus pissing off Emperor the Pooh.

        "While there is currently no clear evidence of sustained human-to-human transmission, we do not have enough evidence to evaluate the full extent of human-to-human transmission.
        This is one of the issues that @WHO

        • Do you know how many cases did they have to go on?

          • The official count is hundreds. Those are Chicom numbers from data that has no credibility and has been shown, repeatedly, to be factually impossible. You can probably safely add a zero to that number and still have a comfortable margin between you and the actual number.

            The WHO lost any credibility and integrity when it didn't call that out plain as day and danced along to Xi's tune.

            • Any proof that the Chinese numbers are impossible and numbered in the thousands? By your theory, the Chinese could have kept denying it entirely until today. If the number was in the thousands, other countries would have detected dozens of cases. What state were you in btw, when they diagnosed you with COVID?

              • The data fuckery mainland China has pulled with their Covid stats is so large, it has its own wiki page. I'll let you do your own research beyond that.

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                I was in western Washington State, in the original US hotzone (the first confirmed case in the US was barely an hour's drive from me along a major highway corridor).

                Myself and my family were within the first 5,000 confirmed cases in the nation, and we tested hot an entire month (almost exactly to the day) after the onset of o

                • Correction: West Taiwan's data fuckery has MULTIPLE wiki pages. Here's more...

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                  Here's some more analysis...

                  https://www.forbes.com/sites/g... [forbes.com]

                  • What matters is that the outbreak happened was know some weeks before and news of it was actively suppressed by the Chinese.

                    OTOH, Trump was president, so it would not matter if China had been totally transparent, the USA would have stuffed it up anyway.

                    Australia did not have much difficulty containing the early strains, only when Delta came out did our quarantining start to fail.

                    But the thing that really matters is that a bat coronavirus mysteriously arose in the city with the world's leading coronavirus la

              • The proof are satellite photos that show immense amounts of people sieging the hospitals around the hotspots.

                When China started to communicate about it, they likely already had 100,000 infected. Especially with those many showing no symptoms.

            • Those are Chicom numbers

              Of course they are, that is how the WHO operates. They are not a group of independent doctors working in hospitals around the world getting their own numbers.

              Seriously how is it that after 2 years you still know nothing about the organisation. Did Fox News rot your brain, or was it long COVID?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The WHO always makes cautious statements until there is very clear scientific proof. Just because it seems obvious to you doesn't mean that there is a peer reviewed paper with statistically valid results proving it.

          The WHO's job is not to assign blame or criticise countries. In fact it's job is to avoid doing that so that countries keep cooperating. The reason they switched to using Greek letters for variants was to avoid associating them with the places where they were first discovered, lest countries be r

          • We do have to ask all the blame-China idiots why we or any other country couldn't control the outbreak either. The rest of the world, including us, had plenty of warning -- as far back as 2019. we knew a new virus had been detected. We actually had more warning than China had. China had to detect that a new virus was emerging. I mean, how often does a doctor even order specialized unknown-virus detection testing for flu-like or coughing symptoms? If we couldn't stop the outbreak, how could China have been e

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I don't understand why Gates himself isn't cutting the check for his proposed "GERM" team. Last I heard, he was in charge of a large charitable organization with billions in assets.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Chicom? Are you really using a term that had gone out of fashion by 1975? Do you think that makes you sound cool or edgy? Just makes you sound stupid and racist.

    • Remember how in FEBRUARY of 2020, the WHO was still buckling to Chicom pressure and insisting that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of a disease that had already infected 80,000 people, even according to the wildly turd-polished figures released by the Chinese Communist Party?

      No I don't. Do you have a cite for that? Specifically from the WHO itself who openly publish all their correspondence?

      I do remember how in February (it's not an acronym, no need to capitalise it) of 2020 they published that an epidemic had started and they had insufficient information to make any recommendations. I also remember that the WHO doesn't have doctors in government in each country and rely on country figures and country based medical institutions telling them the current state within a country.

      Yo

    • Remember how in FEBRUARY of 2020, the WHO was still buckling to Chicom pressure and insisting that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission of a disease that had already infected 80,000 people

      https://dictionary.cambridge.o... [cambridge.org]

      evidence
      noun /ËevidÉ(TM)ns/

      information etc that gives reason for believing something; proof (eg in a law case)
      Have you enough evidence (of his guilt) to arrest him?

      (an) indication; a sign
      Her bag on the table was the only evidence of her presence.

      What exactly is you

  • Fires are obvious and bad, and we still (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @04:11PM (#62474536)

    let some of them burn themselves out rather than risking lives to stop an inevitability.

    It's pretty much accepted now that nearly a century of overzealous fire suppression out west is a major contributing factor to why the fire seasons have been so bad for the last 10 or 20 years.

    Similarly, overzealous suppression of infectious diseases will have the same result: atrophied immune systems that are ripe for fast and virulent spread of otherwise benign nuisances.

    Repeat after me: suppressing the spread of disease is only sensible if there is artificially provided immunity on the other side. If not, you get a situation like Hong Kong or Shanghai.

    But here's the deal: we have no way to *only* suppress the spread of Respiratory Disease X; anything we do to suppress it (lockdowns, travel bans, etc) will also suppress common colds and flus and the rest of the stuff too.

    If you do that for a few weeks, it's probably irrelevant, but if you do that for a year-plus, you buy yourself the following problems, which we're in the process of paying for with the covid lockdowns:

    1. Unstimulated immune systems less ready to fight off the nuisance stuff: the reason colds are nuisances and not health threats is because we keep getting exposed to them repeatedly. As we've seen with covid, immunity wanes. First immunity to infection and then immunity against severe disease. A low level of spread and constant exposure (to other people's anti-body-covered partially neutralized viruses as opposed to a full blast of raw virus) is nature's annual booster shot. Take it away and you're in for a walop next time you catch it. A lot of those non-covid Worst Cold of My Life people have been having recently coming out of lockdown are just that.

    2. Children not getting exposed early enough: people forget that the population isn't static and the rhythms of viral spread are a crucial part of maturation from birth to early adulthood by which time we're exposed to most of the stuff out there and tend to not suffer severe disease for a merciful few decades in our prime. Interrupt that for a few weeks or months and the kids will still get their immunity on time. Interrupt it for years and the kids will have a big hole punched in their immunity that they're going to pay for the hard way later.

    3. Breakdown in flu surveillance for flu shot formulations. This was a big one. The flu shots made for the northern hemisphere are for the strains that are dominant in the southern hemisphere during their winter, based on the assumptions that it will be the dominant strains down there that migrate their way up here. Lock down travel between the hemispheres and you're flying blind. Which is why this winter's flu shot was something like 10% effective versus the usual 50% or so.

    Virus-free existence is not a desirable goal. Hundreds of millions of years of vertebrate evolution, including the last few million years of homonid evolution have resulted in a human race that is tailored for a life that is at with some level of equilibrium with infectious disease.

    Explicitly and purposefully introducing more new pathogens would upset that equilibrium, but so would eliminating many of the pathogens we take for granted now.

    I'm all for rolling out new vaccines for emerging threats, and eradicating skeeters and other insect vectors of encephalitis and the like, but an overzealous effort to stop all respiratory illnesses has too many costs that a panic-driven reaction to covid is very obviously failing to consider.

    And I'll also point out that this is a dangerous and hostile world, filled with many bad actors. And an international body empowered to impose economic costs in the name of public health would be very tempting to weaponize against us.

    I don't want the Chinese or the Russians having any ounce of say over my ability to get on a plane or drive across state lines or leave my home.

    • Vaccines stimulate the immune system. I think that negates your entire argument. Instead of actually getting sick, vaccines expose you to certain germs so that you develop an immunity. You are confusing vaccines with hygiene.

    • I don't think I've ever seen a better post/username combo. Truly awe inspiring.

    • It's a bad analogy. Fires aren't infectious people--You don't put them out with a hose and water. Second, and more importantly, you typically evacuate surrounding buildings in the event of fire. That's not what you would do in a pandemic. You can't see how far the infection has spread, so the only option is to prevent the free movement of the population. Who is going to give GERM the authority to randomly quarantine populations around the globe? You aren't going to develop a vaccine in days or even weeks. I

  • His Method... (Score:3)

    by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @04:12PM (#62474542) Journal
    He's going to prevent the next pandemic by shorting Pfizer stock... [businessinsider.com]
    • Hmm. Great Link. More Below

      Musk then sent a follow up text, writing: "Do you still have a half billion dollar short position against Tesla?"

      "Sorry to say I haven't closed it out," Gates responded, according to the screenshots, adding: "I would like to discuss philanthropy possibilities."

      Musk replied: "Sorry, but I cannot take your philanthropy on climate change seriously when you have a massive short position against Tesla, the company doing the most to solve climate change."

  • Pretty lame PR (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just demand more transparency from the government so we can have a more reliable source of information. With all this secrecy, all we get is QAnon clogging up the internet.

  • I feel sorry for him (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 )
    Bill Gates is trying to promote public health through vaccination, sanitation etc. Things designed to improve the quality of life and end needless suffering in impoverished nations. So what is his reward? Mentally ill and conspiracy minded cretins thinking he is some kind of illuminati eugenics operative.

    • When you've had a reputation for being a world class dick for the last 40 or so years, expect people to be suspicious of your motives.

    • Re:I feel sorry for him (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @08:06PM (#62475084) Homepage Journal

      So what is his reward?

      There are two common purposes to philantrophy by super-rich people who became super-rich through ethically questionable means.

      One, white-washing. Either for the purpose of public image (we on /. still hate Gates for the 20 or so years he has kept the IT industry back, but most people and even some of the young ones here don't remember that, they only remember his Foundation) - or for themselves as a kind of (excuse the hyperbole but I lack better words) atoning for their sins.

      Two, narcissm. The deep need to feel loved and important. Throw your money on a good problem and people will love YOU for things that other people worked 20, 30 or more years on developing and your money simply accelerated. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but the motivation is attaching your name to something, and the reward (what you asked about) is feeling good about yourself.

      • You forgot three:
        feeling good and satisfied after doing something good for someone else.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tom ( 822 )

          I didn't forget that, I discared it.

          If you look at Gates' history, you would have to make a case that somewhere along the way, he suddenly changed personality. There's no reason to believe that's the case.

          It fits in much more closely with his first book. A collection of boring non-wisdoms and visions for the future of which so many were utterly wrong that the second edition silently updated them. Nobody needed that book, except the one guy who wanted to have "I wrote a book" in his list of accomplishments.

  • The rest of the world (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @05:14PM (#62474652)
    Does Gates mean something like the WHO's Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (PIP) Framework? https://www.who.int/initiative... [who.int] This is just one of many programmes that the WHO has in operation for infectious diseases, epidemics & pandemics. Arguably, the reasons COVID-19 became pandemic were mostly political rather than logistical.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The WHO has to remain politically neutral in order to function. What Gates seems to be suggesting is something with more clout to send people in and give countries orders, or at least something stronger than advice.

      That's why it probably wouldn't work. Political leaders will have competing concerns - the economy, constituents dislike of rules and mandates, not wanting to be the source of a new disease etc.

      • Perhaps the answer is to help countries to develop plans ahead of epidemics so that they can avoid the pitfalls or simply reacting to conditions as they arise & sometimes doing more harm than good to both their citizens & their economies?

  • Only with Mandatory testing and vacination (Score:3)

    by Anon42Answer ( 6662006 ) on Sunday April 24, 2022 @05:14PM (#62474654)

    The only way to do what he want is if there is mandatory testing and mandatory vaccinations.
    It may be called voluntary, but if you want to fly it is mandatory.
    Forcing people to no be able to live and do things because they don't want to be tested is not voluntary.
    As good as it might be for the world, that seems a severe overreach for freedom and democratic governments.

  • As Elon Musk trolled the other day, looking at this image of a pregnant Bill Gates [twimg.com] will quickly kill a boner. What a concept! A chemical free, surgical procedure free method of killing a boner! There are so many things can be used for but the first thing that comes to mind is itcan also help teen boys avoid embarrassing in-class boners. My poor 12 year old son is constantly dealing with this now, but I just have to print him one of these images! No more boners look at Mrs. Brady's big tits!

    Elon, you're a

  • But in a world where rules are irrelevant to the 0.1%, can quarantine work? Will Bill Gates&co ever be locked down by a quarantine or will they always by complete coincidence just be out of the area before it starts? Of course convinced that as masters of the universe they are doing this not out of personal self interest, but for the good of society, they need to be free to do their important work.

    Without solidarity, the peons will have little patience with the rules either.

  • funding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geckoFeet ( 139137 ) <gecko@dustyfeet.com> on Sunday April 24, 2022 @05:33PM (#62474696)

    $1 billion a year? He could fund that himself, easily, easily.

  • I didn't realize that was still a thing.

  • Given that Bill Gates has no more qualifications than me about Virology and Epidemiology maybe it's my turn next to give a TED talk - or is it because I'm not a billionaire so my views count for jack shit compared to his.
  • Someone in TFG's admin zero'd in on PREDICT [wikipedia.org] as an example of "the swamp" axing the funding in September 2019, and killing the program completely in March 2020. It was created to "predict" when a zoonotic disease would transfer to humans, and then stop it from becoming a pandemic - and was successful several times. The fabled Wuhan lab was involved with it. What we DON'T need is the severely undertaxed ultra-billionaire class being in charge of this sort of thing - they need to have their billions taxed,

  • Why is Gates such an outspoken figure about this epidemic? He is not a physician or scientist. He doesn't know anymore about the vaccine than you or I.

    • Actually he knows less, because he thinks he knows more, so he doesn't understand that he doesn't. Dunning-Kruger on a steroid level.

  • What are these bill gates? Some way to automate your bills coming in? Or maybe prevent them altogether? I could get behind that.

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