bill: ‘Masks are pretty magical. I’m surprised that people got fatigued wearing them’: Bill Gates | India News
[ad_1]
Q: What are the key lessons from Covid-19? Do you think the world is now going to listen to the advice, or learn lessons, and do things which are right, in preventing such pandemics?
A: Yes, I think so. After all, the tragedy of this pandemic, in terms of the lives lost, the education, the depression, the negative effects, even the indebtedness of governments that’ll take decades to work off, they are very pervasive. And so for a lot of countries, it’s worse than a gigantic war was. And so just in the same way that humanity takes other disasters like fire in a city. or earthquakes. or war, and says, “okay, governments owe it to their citizens to be prepared”, and these investments can be made. And what we saw during the pandemic is that a few countries, where Australia is probably the best example, that were ready to roll out diagnostics and enforce some quarantine, they were able to stop the disease and they ended up with the death rate less than 10% of most of the other rich countries. So Australia compared to, say, the United States or most of Europe, that factor of ten is a big deal.. This idea of reacting quickly to get diagnostics and quarantine out, we have to have a global capability to see the disease coming, and then each country has to practice. I’m very big on the analogy to fire where the fire department practices quite a bit, and so when a real fire comes, they’re not sitting there saying, and Oh, what do we do; They know where the water is and where the resources are. Even the public had some degree of training about getting out of the building, wait calmly. And so it would be stunning if the world didn’t invest in being better prepared. Of course, the world is very distracted by many challenges, but this one deserves serious attention.
Bill Gates on lessons the world has learnt from the Covid-19 pandemic
Q: In your book, you talk about that in the summer of 2022, we could be out of this acute phase of Covid-19. And in an interview that we had with you, you had spoken that if all countries cooperated, we could end the disease by 2022. How close are we to that?
A: Well, we’re always subject to new variants coming along that could surprise us. And we have to be pretty humble about that because we underestimated the risk of the variants, particularly Omicron, which when it came, had a level of transmissibility that was much higher than the original virus.
And so it’s important to look all over the world and say, you know, are the people at risk of severe disease and death, have they either been vaccinated or have they been infected? We believe unless a variant totally surprises us, the people who’ve had sort of one infection plus one vaccine, or 2 to 3 vaccines, we believe that very few of those will get severe disease and death. And so doubling down on getting the vaccine out to particularly the elderly, getting those coverage rates up, that’s imperative.
We saw sadly in Hong Kong, where their elderly vaccination rate was only about 35%, that Omicron is causing a wave of deaths there. They’re getting some benefit from these therapeutics that have come along, but it’s still kind of a tragic example.
So if a really bad variant doesn’t come along, then countries that have the high vaccination rates really should see this more like they see flu. That is, it causes death. In local outbreaks, you would presume masks and some distancing, but you would not be shutting down the schools and the economy in any broad way because just the death rate would be below what even a bad flu season looks like.
Q: You say that it is possible to prepare an effective and safe vaccine for the next time, to make it in six months. How close are we to this?
A: Well, that’s one area where the world did way better than we expected in advance, and it took up to even a little bit less than a year. And so we had quite a bit of volume of vaccines. Within a year-and-a-half, there have been quite a bit of vaccination. So this time, we have to cut that time in half.
That is challenging, unless we have a platform like an mRNA or a particular approach where your risk of side effects and the new factory work you have to do is actually quite low. So if it does turn out that mRNA can be improved to have even better duration that may be the platform that gets picked.
And of course, the Gates Foundation will work with the Indian manufacturers to fund them and help them get to where they have deep expertise and capacity in whatever the pandemic platform is, which right now it’s most likely mRNA.
Q: So in India, the backbone of vaccine delivery from booking a slot to getting a certificate is more mobile driven and largely glitch-free. How much having such a system is helpful in tackling a pandemic?
A: Well, there are a lot of digital things that India is a leader on, and the Aadhaar identity system really helps with that a lot. It means that, of course, how do you identify somebody for their vaccine? Well, you use Aadhaar. And what if somebody’s pretending to have a vaccine certificate? Well, then their bio ID is going to give them away.
And so a few countries, that’s one where Israel and India did a very good job, and other countries should learn from that, because it means you don’t have fake vaccine certificates. You can quickly look up if you’re trying to enforce compliance on vaccines.
Of course, those policies are complicated, but you have the tools to do it well and even understand, okay, which city is getting high rates? Are you getting the elderly as well as you should?
India did target the elderly. And it’s quite a good story. Our foundation helped Serum get going, and Serum and a few of the other vaccine manufacturers ramped up in a very impressive way.
Q: Specifically about India’s fight against Covid, which are the areas that did well, and which didn’t?
A: Well, sadly, the Delta wave caught the world by surprise, and the Delta wave in India rose so quickly. I mean, even today – you know, India has people move around a lot. India has multigenerational households. Th
ere are some things, just because of the density of the urban areas, that made India at risk of that type of a rise. But still, it’s really incredible how quickly – and you know, India, to its credit, actually saw that happening because it had enough testing capacity, that there it was. And okay, very quickly, measures were put in place to respond to that.
The amount of Delta infection combined with the vaccination levels meant that India, at least so far, has not had a bad Omicron wave. Most of the bad effects of the epidemic came during that horrific, surprising Delta wave.
India now should keep pushing on getting those vaccination rates up because there will be some Omicron outbreaks. Omicron is just so transmissive. I don’t think it will be gigantic, nothing like that big wave. But it’s not completely over, at this point.
So India has a lot to feel good about in terms of vaccines, digital systems, and communications. Every country can say, “I wish we’d done our good stuff even sooner than we did our good stuff”, but there’s a lot to build on as we build this system to do even better when we face the next one.
Bill Gates on what worked for India in its fight against Covid-19 and where it fell short
Q: You talk about making and finding a plan for preventing the next pandemic. Could you elaborate on this?
A: Yeah, so there are three investments that I put forward in the book to prevent future pandemics. First is this global monitoring, which I call GERM. That actually is fairly inexpensive. That’s like a billion a year and connected to the WHO, and that is the sort of central brain that’s making sure we practice, and rating everybody, and having the data systems so that we catch outbreaks very early.
The second is better tools. The diagnostics, we need them to be cheaper, higher volume, and easy to administer. And there are a lot of good ideas on those diagnostics, including diagnostics that we could use for normal years to detect the diseases that are out there. We need better therapeutics.
Those came way too late, and finally, we need vaccines that are easier to administer, like a patch or an aerosol, and vaccines that have more infection blocking and broader coverage. And so, that is a larger category, probably $10-$20 billion a year, if you go across all the countries and the research they should do to make those new tools.
The third category is the big one, that’s to strengthen health systems. And there, again, very country will have to look at, okay, what are its weaknesses. Could an outbreak fester without being noticed for a month, and then the whole world would suffer because we wouldn’t be getting ready and it would be spreading. And particularly, this is about respiratory diseases, that we have to see any elevation and call in expert resources.
The overall cost of these three things, we’re in the $150 billion range over five years. If you compare it to the cost we suffered, the $14 trillion, the ratio there is very favourable to buying this insurance policy, particularly because the things that I’m suggesting would have benefits. These better vaccines aren’t just for the pandemic, they’re also for malaria eradication and tuberculosis, and many other diseases, even the flu where, although we don’t have pandemics, it causes a lot of sickness. And if we could have super good universal vaccines, we would try and get rid of flu from humans and all of the year-to-year burden, which is quite substantial.
Bill Gates on what nations can do to prevent the next pandemic
Q: Right. In terms of vaccine inequality, how can the world solve this huge problem, which we saw during Covid-19 as well? How can the world solve this problem?
A: Well, probably the best way is to make, within six months, enough vaccines for the entire world. I don’t think you can predict… If you can’t make that many, I don’t think there’s any avoiding the fact that the richer countries and the countries that have the vaccine factories are going to be slightly privileged over the poorer countries without vaccine factories. And so, I think we have to just make enough.
In the case of this pandemic, the great inequity was actually that young people in any country got vaccinated before old people in every country. And so, some older South Africans weren’t vaccinated when young people in the United States were being vaccinated. And so, once we understood the risk factors for the disease, we didn’t do a good job on a global basis of getting the vaccines to the elderly, particularly as we realized the vaccines don’t block transmission with Omicron. The benefits of vaccinating the young, it’s still a positive benefit, but it’s not a gigantic benefit and not even close to vaccinating the elderly. And that’s a tough prioritisation because vaccine systems just aren’t set up to focus on an age group. But first of all, we should stop pandemics before we need vaccines for the whole world. If we need that many vaccines, then my book – (laughter) – my prediction of the book will have failed. That is, we’ll be back in another pandemic.
Fortunately, for many of these vaccine platforms, getting factories that have standby capacity to make a lot, if you say that India becomes self-sufficient, China becomes self-sufficient, the West largely self-sufficient, that each of those three big centres has to have enough extra capacity during their six months, so that you can offer vaccines to the entire world.
Now, some people would say, hey, put vaccine factories everywhere, and that’ll be debated, but the practicality of that in terms of the cost and the need for quality, I think people who haven’t worked much in the vaccine industry think it’s easier to build vaccine factories than it is.
Bill Gates on how the world can tackle the problem of vaccine inequity
Q: Right. You briefly refer to the threat of bioterrorism. How real is that, and do you think governments are
defences?
A: Now, that’s a very scary threat, and this book does not go through all the things you would want to do to block bioterrorism. And over time, bioterrorism gets scarier as the tools to create bad viruses is less something that only countries could do, and more something that terrorist groups could do.
Now, I will say that a hundred percent of what the book recommends is necessary to be ready for that type of evil attack, but there are some even more sophisticated surveillance things, like in every airport, looking at water and air, and even sampling blood from time to time. And so, it’s a super set, what we need to do, and I hope other authors go into that, but my book really focuses on naturally caused pandemics and preventing those from happening again.
Q: What could be the nature of the next pandemic? Could it be more dangerous than what we have seen now? And a related question to that is are lockdowns the answer to meeting pandemics, because it has a huge cost, economic cost for the globe?
A: If a new pathogen with a high fatality rate got out and we didn’t have therapies or vaccines, we would need to use lockdowns. Now, most respiratory pathogens don’t have a high fatality rate, human-to-human transmissible. There are exceptions. Measles in a naïve population will kill almost 20 percent. Smallpox in a naïve population would kill over 30 percent. Those are just extreme. And now, with Covid, the death rate is somewhere between 0.2 percent and 0.4 percent. This is not the worst case. And if you can isolate in a region of the world and not let it go global, then at least if you’re having to do some lockdowns, it’s very geographically constrained. We let this one got global before we were able to contain it. And some countries, New Zealand, Australia, caught it before it was in one percent of their population. They still had to do some lockdowns, but way less than the United States or most of Europe did.
Lockdowns are tricky, and we should be studying them. They make people move; it’s tricky. There’s many types of lockdowns and the way that humans respond to lockdowns. A few governments can be extreme in enforcing lockdowns, primarily China. Other governments just can’t do that. Whether it’s good or bad, they have to be realistic about how well enforced big lockdowns are going to be.
Q: My last question, Bill, is about the use of masks. As we have seen in several countries, as the disease is ebbing, the tendency is to discard masks. Is that the right approach or should masks be used as a first defence against the virus?
A: Yeah, masks are pretty incredible. I talk in the book about getting some drug that would activate your immune system to reduce the rate of infection. And we’d have it stockpiled, that it would work for any viral outbreak, but you have to compare that to a mask. A mask is pretty cheap, and easy to stockpile.
I am surprised that people did get fatigued about wearing masks. We had one country, Japan, where mask compliance was unbelievably high because it’s sort of viewed as a politeness to other people when you’re in close proximity. And even during flu season, they’re used to it. So, they saved a lot of lives with masks.
Now, sadly, in the United States people are like, hey, this was painful. And so, the mask mandates are going away and mask use is going down. If you’re unvaccinated, you actually need to wear a pretty sophisticated mask to make sure that you’re not getting infected. If you’re infected, then any mask reduces the number of people you infect by a lot.
Masks are pretty magical and they don’t have many downsides. However, when humans are together, say, drinking or eating, then you just tend to take the mask off, and we never solved that. This antiviral drug, together with masks, hopefully, will be available for next time. We’re going to get surprised. And in some cases, we will have wished we’d put mask mandates on where there’ll be local outbreaks. But to my surprise, people really do get fatigued from wearing masks.
Masks are pretty magical and they don’t have a downside: Bill Gates
[ad_2]
Source link
