Shortly after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, the couple set the bold goal of putting a “computer on every desk and in every home.” When the goal, previously unimaginable, came to fruition, it propelled Gates to world fame, to fortune, and made his name synonymous with innovation and technology.
More than forty-five years after co-founding Microsoft and helping launch the information age, Bill Gates seems to stand firm in his commitment to innovate and solve the world’s most complicated problems, including those related to change. climate change, malaria and the covid pandemic19.
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Last March, two days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus epidemic a pandemic, Gates announced plans to leave his place on Microsoft’s board of directors to devote more time to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic initiative initiated by her husband. -women’s team in 2000.
A voracious reader and consumer of information, Gates often finds himself dumping research papers on the world’s most pressing challenges, as witnessed by 60-minute correspondent Anderson Cooper in interviewing him.
In 2015, during the Ebola epidemic in Africa, Gates ’attention focused on pandemic prevention, responding to a poignant warning in a 2015 TED Talk that has seen more than 72 million sometimes through transmission platforms.
“If something kills more than 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s very likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates told the TED audience. “Not missiles, but microbes. Now part of the reason for this is that we’ve invested a lot in nuclear deterrents. But in fact, we’ve invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not prepared for the next one.” epidemic “.
Gates said within 60 minutes that the United States should have made a relatively nominal investment in developing PCR diagnostic testing capability before it became a terrible necessity.
“You could have launched the tests so quickly,” Gates told Cooper. “If you earn a month in terms of having that capacity, it’s a completely different epidemic for the country.”
Gates said there were “errors” in the U.S. response to the pandemic, but the nation’s role in vaccine research and development helped the world “immensely.”
To date, the Food and Drug Administration has only issued an emergency use permit for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Both are mRNA-based vaccines and are the first of their kind to be widely distributed outside of clinical trials in the United States.
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Gates and his foundation have long advocated for mRNA vaccine technology. He hopes that its use to combat future medical needs will be one of the many innovations that will be obtained from a year that would be difficult.
A pandemic year in which science occupied a central place and its skeptics tried to sow doubts in the research and experience of leading scientists.
“We have to make the truth more interesting than the overly simplistic conspiracy,” Gates said in 60 minutes. “There may be some need to slow down the madness. There is a need for innovation to think about how you draw these lines and, most importantly, when you come out exposing strangers to something that might lure them into a series of falsehoods.”
At age 65, innovation remains a central force in Bill Gates ’life. Instead of enjoying the success of an accomplished career, reflection is replaced by the urgency and desire to complete moon initiatives that can save millions of lives and ensure that their work will last for generations.
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“I don’t think the legacy motivates anyone,” Gates helps Cooper. “I think, go, I have, you know, I hope 20 to 30 years, where, you know, can we eradicate malaria in this time period? Can we lay the groundwork for a climate solution in this time period? So I’m sorry a bit of an urgency that, after 30 years, he can’t take part in it “, it is already known.
The previous videos were produced by Keith Zubrow and Sarah Shafer Prediger. They were edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.