The Microsoft billionaire, Bill Gates, is funding the construction of factories for the production of seven coronavirus vaccine candidates.
In discussion with Trevor Noah on ‘The Daily Show’ on the existent global crisis of coronavirus pandemic. He informed about the optimistic plan of his Gates Foundation to fund the production of coronavirus vaccines.
Gates said they will pick up only one or two of the seven coronavirus vaccine candidates, which implies the wastage of billions of dollars spent on the other vaccines candidates. But it is worth if they successfully create a vaccine to save human lives and stop the loss of trillions to economies
“We can save months, and every month counts.” @BillGates and Trevor discuss combating coronavirus tonight at 11/10c pic.twitter.com/fYijnZa6tF
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) April 3, 2020
He informed Trevor Noah that his foundation has better expertise to mobilize and accelerate the fight against coronavirus than the governments.
“Because our foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we’ve thought about the epidemic, we did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort,” Gates said. “Our early money can accelerate things.”
He said he is selecting the top seven vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time in serially saying, ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,” he said.
He informed that simultaneous testing of the vaccines and building of manufacturing capacity is essential for timely development that can take approximately 18 months.
Read more: COVID-19: Is social distancing & drug trials showing results?
“It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better,” Gates said in the clip. “But a few billion in this, the situation we’re in, where there are trillions of dollars … being lost economically, it is worth it.”
He added that Gates Foundation can get that bootstrapped and get it going in months because every month counts.
Post-pandemic world
Bill Gates has even predicted a grim post-pandemic world, where he says the underdeveloped economies will tend to suffer more than developed economies.
In a post-pandemic world, he said, “There will be countries that, no matter how hard they try, will have a widespread epidemic. And so, again sadly, the richer countries that do contain the virus will not allow people from those countries to come in unless they are quarantined and tested. This is going to stop people going across borders for the next few years until we get to the full vaccination.”
In another interview with Daily Homeroom with Sal, he predicts that it will take months for the world to return to normalcy. He said it is likely to take a month to flatten the exponential rise of cases and another month to decrease the active cases of COVID-19.
Read more: How to educate kids during lockdown?
“You could get to a point where, because you’re targeting the testing and getting quick results, you do start to open up … where kids go to school and people go back to their jobs,” he said.
Gates added that even if social life resumes it would be under strict guidelines. “It’s not normal. They don’t do sports events or big gatherings. That will wait until [we have] the vaccine,” he said Bill Gates.
“It’ll take a while to get back into the ‘let’s go take a vacation, let’s go buy a new house’ type of mode,” Gates said.
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He added that the economic devastation is unprecedented adding that COVID-19 is likely to have a severe social impact than that of the 2008 economic downturn, plummeting to the level of the Great Depression and World War II.
Bill said even going digital to reduce social contact is not viable since some communities are not so well connected. But he says there is a silver lining to this pandemic and that is how people are rising to respond to the situation.
Adding that “The rest of your life, you will think of this event and how you responded to it as a defining thing.”