Bill Gates Reddit “Ask Me Anything” about Coronavirus is pretty f**ken insightful!
While we all know that Bill Gates is pretty much THE computer guy – and no, we’re not debating it, ya big Steve Jobs groupies – it often passes people by that the Microsoft legend knows a thing or two about infectious diseases. Yeah, nah, because he’s a solid f**ken humanitarian, he’s spent plenty of money and plenty of time researching and fighting diseases like Ebola, Influenza, and now, Covid-19. In light of this, he took some time to field questions on Reddit. To be fair, it turned out to be pretty f**ken insightful…
So look, obviously, we’re not Bill Gates and we can’t presume to speak for him. That’s why we reckon you might want to get the goss straight from the big legend’s mouth. For that reason, we’ll cover a couple of the key points by quoting him, but you’ll be able to suss out more by going to the original source or his own transcript.
Basically, as we’ve already mentioned, Gates spends a lot of coin fighting diseases through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As a result, he went on Reddit and had what he called, “a fact-based discussion about this pandemic and what we can do to prevent the next one.”
One of the most interesting questions was the one about vaccines: One bloke asked if Gatesy knew if the 18-month estimated timeframe could be shortened.
“This is a great question. There are over 6 different efforts going on to make a vaccine. Some use a new approach called RNA which is unproven. We will have to build lots of manufacturing for the different approaches knowing that some of them will not work. We will need literally billions of vaccines to protect the world. Vaccines require testing to make sure they are safe and effective. Some vaccines like the flu don’t for the elderly.
“The first vaccines we get will go to health care workers and critical workers. This could happen before 18 months if everything goes well but we and Dr. Fauci and others are being careful not to promise this when we are not sure. The work is going at full speed.”
Another asked him about China’s response. Seeing that the Chinese are copping a bit of flak from f**kheads everywhere about the virus, we reckon he answered this one well.
“After January 23 when they realized how serious it was they did strong social isolation which made a huge difference. Of course that isolation created a lot of difficulties for the people involved but they were able to stop the case spread. Other countries will do it somewhat differently but a combination of testing and social isolation clearly works and that is all we have until we get a vaccine.”
What we like there is that he didn’t resort to racist bulls**t. Yeah, nah, that’s not on.
Anyway, the last question we’ll focus on is the one that asked him his thoughts on why governments weren’t prepared.
“No one could predict what the chance of a new virus emerging was. However, we did know it would happen at some point either with a flu or some other respiratory virus. There was almost no funding. The creation of CEPI which was funded by our foundation, Wellcome, Norway, Japan, Germany, and the UK was a step but tiny compared to what should have happened. We prepare for possible wars and fires and now we have to have preparation for epidemics treated with the same seriousness. The good news is that our biological tools including new ways to make diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines make it possible to have a strong response system for naturally caused epidemics.”
Final thought: Anyway, as you can imagine, there’s tonnes more. If you want to check it out, visit either of the sites linked above, and get lost in the discussion. Of course, we just wish someone had asked him whether Trump’s covfefe tweet was secret code for other members of the lizardman Illuminati. Anyway, as always, stay safe, and don’t go to the beach, ya dingalings. Stay indoors and pull your pud. It’s a way better idea.
You might also want to check out Bill’s 2015 talk on this s**t to see how well he knows his stuff!
Just in case you missed it, here’s one of Ozzy’s latest commentary videos…Ozzy Man Reviews: Coronavirus
Video Link: TED
H/T: REDDIT.