Derek: So how did it feel to make this prediction and then
have the world essentially not listen and not prepare?
Bill Gates: Well there's no good feeling that comes on something like this saying i told you so
If anything kills over 10 million people
in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly
infectious virus rather than a war.
You know I just think back and could I have been more persuasive?
We've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic.
We're not ready for the next epidemic.
Derek: How did you make such a prescient prediction?
How did you know this was going to happen?
BG: Well there's a number of respiratory viruses
and from time to time one will come along that's very transmissive and causes some level of fatalities.
Respiratory diseases are very scary
because you're still walking around on a plane, a bus when you're infectious
unlike some other diseases like ebola where you're mostly
in a hospital bed by the time the viral load
infects other people.
Derek: Hey, so recently i got the chance to interview
Bill Gates when his foundation's annual letter came out
I'll link to it in the description and we talked about lots of things including
conspiracy theories and misinformation but about the pandemic i wanted to know
if so many people could see this coming and the costs of prevention were
relatively small then why wasn't more done about it?
BG: Well there's some risks like earthquakes where we see small earthquakes all the time.
Or you know the history of war or fire or
hurricanes so you don't forget.
These pandemics only come along so irregularly
that being lulled into a sense of security where it probably won't be a
problem in the next few years, why should we put money into that?
You don't buy the insurance policy, basically.
This one will help us understand it needs to be a priority.
Derek: I feel like humans have an issue though with fighting the last battle
potentially, so if we focus on pandemics now and there
isn't one say for another hundred years
What is the next disaster? What is the one that we're not prepared for?
BG: Well I'd point out two:
One is climate change.
Every year that would be a death toll
even greater than we've had in this pandemic.
Also, related to pandemics is something people don't like to talk about much
which is bioterrorism, that somebody who wants to cause damage could
engineer a virus and so that means the cost
the chance of running into this is more than just the naturally cost
epidemics like the current one.
Derek: It feels to me like
there's something similar about pandemics and you know climate change or
like asteroid impact, which is that you know they're not very
tangible but you could do a little bit.
I don't know it seems like humans are not
very good at those sorts of problems.
BG: Well my favorite writer, Vaclav Smil, you know wrote about all the potential
kinds of disasters like you know the risk of an asteroid, the risk of a
you know yellowstone-like eruption and in fact he showed that pandemics
were significantly the biggest thing other than a
human-caused nuclear war that we needed to be more prepared for
Derek: So what changes do we put in place to be readier for the next one and
is it possible that covid-19 could be the last global pandemic?
BG: Well certainly there will be more pandemics. The ways that humans interact with other
species, these viruses are coming across a species barrier whether it's from bats
or monkeys or
Derek: but you don't think we could increase our preparedness to such a level that
it never sort of becomes this global issue?
BG: We could increase our preparedness so we never have a death toll
uh anywhere near what we have today.
You know pandemics can be worse in terms of
the fatalities. Smallpox was a over 30 per cent fatality. You know so a little
bit we were lucky that the fatality here is not
not super high but we can nip it in the bud it'll still
get to a lot of countries but the number of deaths you know
uh with the right system should be a tenth of what we we've seen here.
Derek: And the systems that you want to put in place so this
sort of so you can nip it in the bud or so what are the key elements
that we didn't have that we should have going forward?
BG: I would divide it into two sections:
There's the field based activity and the R&D activity.
In R&D we need to mature mRNA so we can make it even faster and have
factories all over the world,
have it be cheap and thermal stable.
There's a lot that can go into therapeutics including antibodies.
On diagnostics having the ability to give
10 million PCR tests a day.
Then in terms of the field we need
a lot of diagnostic machines all over the world.
We need a team of epidemiologists. So the investments are about equal between
R&D and the the field-based group and information that should beconstantly flowing.
Derek: You know I feel like there's a meta-issue
that is kind of above all of these issues which is you know
the way that people connect with reality and figure out what's true and
what's not and you know what information to believe.
I've got to say that you know as i was growing up and coming into this
information age it seemed like the Internet and all these tools were going
to make the correct information so much more
easy to access and bring us into a more fact-based world.
Instead it doesn't look as though it's bringing us there.
I wonder if you shared a similar vision for
you know what the Internet might do for all of us and
i don't know if you have any thoughts about the current state of it you know
how do we deal with this?
BG: Well the internet has done something fantastic
which is if you want to learn you know the people who watch you are
you know getting an opportunity to understand
science and what's going on and that just wasn't there
uh and so for a lot of people they're so much more informed.
I mean I have friends who ask me about these variants where I'm just stunned at
how up to date they are with the latest information so
for people who want to learn facts this is a golden age.
You know we focus on the negative part with some of these conspiracy theories
and anti-factual things and so because social media is so new
figuring out how you curb that, you know labeling it restrict
the speed of spread of things that are titillating but false.
We are missing some good ideas to you know not have this kind of scary
phenomena that in the case of anti-vaccine things may
slow down how quickly we get lots of people
uh to take the vaccine and therefore extend the epidemic and
and cost us in in tens of thousands of lives.
Derek: It feels like you're running up against you know kind of that
great American principle of free speech, right? I think it's a great point
that you bring up that you know in the past the problem was kind of scarcity
getting access to this sort of information and now it's sort of a
problem of too much and figuring out which is the good stuff and which is not.
BG: Well there are certainly clear things like you know saying
completely false things about you know vaccines but there is kind of a gray
area in the middle that figuring out what the rules are and
who should be the one looking and interpreting those rules
Wow, we are missing that today. You know can you get a group of experts
that are weighing in on these things you don't really want the profit motive involved
But you want
you know expertise and capacity and so you know a few years from now i hope
we're more sophisticated on what or how that line should be drawn
Derek: you know a while back on my second channel I made a video called
Be Hated, which was kind of about my thoughts about pushing back against
misinformation, that we should see anything that is wrong in the world
and we should do our best to fight it so you should not be liked by everyone
because there are some people out there with bad ideas and you should be pushing
back against them. That was essentially my thought but since then I
feel like my views have softened a little
and now I think of our pushing back against misinformation a little bit like
an immune system. Obviously it's a problem if your immune system is weak if
it doesn't respond to anything but it's also a problem if your immune
system is too strong. You know during the 1918 flu pandemic
there's a really interesting distribution of deaths where the young
and old were more likely to die obviously
because they have weak immune systems but also people in the sort of 25 to 35
year-old range because their immune systems were just so strong
they were overactive and that ended up resulting in mortality
so I feel like there's a sweet spot in terms of how much we push back against
misinformation. You know you'll never see me make a
video about flat earthers because i just don't see
the point. You know making that video only kind of
reconfirms their world view and there's not really any minds to move
there so that's kind of how I'm conceptualizing
misinformation these days, a bit like we have to be a targeted immune system.
So i wanted to push Bill a bit further
on this idea and I brought up a tweet that I had seen doing the rounds on
twitter that basically said that the Oxford vaccine development, they
were going to open source that vaccine until
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation got involved and said
no you must partner exclusively with a big pharma company AstraZeneca
and so obviously it seems to the people on twitter that something nefarious was
going on there, but I wanted to know from Bill what was the real story
BG: Well the making a safe vaccine
is more complicated than say making a jet engine
and people are very picky about vaccines in fact you could ruin the
reputation of vaccines if you're making them in factories
where the quality control at every stage is not exquisite.
and you know any mistake you know you can have that factory shut down
literally for months at a time when its output is needed to
save millions of lives. So vaccine factories are not
something that you just you know you know like open source code that you
can take and you know mess around with and so the the limitations on
how many vaccines are being made, that's based on how many great
capable vaccine manufacturers there are in the world and we've made sure that
the AstraZeneca's being made in these big indian factories and there's no
royalty for that, no charge at all. Now we've had to fund
that, the Gates Foundation. These are companies we've been working
on their factory quality for over a decade
so that there was spare capacity to make inexpensive vaccines
so Oxford University is is wonderful, but they're not capable of doing a phase
three trial and they they don't have factories
We did tell Oxford that they needed to seek somebody
with expertise and AstraZeneca came in and we didn't
control that agreement but they came in and said hey they want to do it on a
non-profit basis and I'm impressed with how they put
their best people on it and helped out. You know the pharma companies who
didn't get involved nobody's criticizing them. So you know
you feel sorry for the ones that are really
miraculously helping make these vaccines.
These are the very good reasons that I suspect exist but
that that's where I feel like social media just doesn't get the nuance
and you know it pains me to see the world like that.
And you know even to see you, Bill, you know be the target of some of these
conspiracy theories
It seems to not bother you but you know it kind of bothers me as a guy who wants
you know everyone to live in the same kind of reality and you know I see
you out there doing great things and I think that you know that should be
commended as opposed to what you get.
I'm not in a position to complain much you know I have a lot of things that you know
make me extremely lucky and you know I hope these conspiracy
theories go away and I don't know what what it'll mean
for the future.
Derek: How do you feel about the vaccine roll-out so far?
BG: Well we you know we need the supply,
we need the logistics and we need the demand
and there are huge challenges in each of those.
I'm hopeful that Johnson and Johnson in the next month will get approved because
that's a single dose vaccine, very cheap highly scalable so
AstraZenica, Johnson and Johnson and a few months later Novovax.
Most of the developing world, those are the vaccines that will be going to them
and so we put billions into trying to make that happen and
you know in a few months hopefully it'll come together.