Thu 28 January 2021:
“The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths).” That’s according to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual letter published Wednesday.
In the annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft co-founder and Billionaire philanthropist calls for billions of dollars in investments to develop a global alert system for emerging germs and build the capacity to respond quickly.
“We can’t afford to be caught flat-footed again,” Gates wrote. “To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war.”
While the cost may sound high, billions spent on infrastructure and technology would represent a huge savings compared to the estimated $28 trillion global toll of COVID-19 and its associated economic fallout, he said.
The American, ranked the third-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes, urged rich countries to provide the bulk of the investment, pointing out that their governments stand to benefit most.
Investments in future diagnostic and vaccination technologies should be supplemented by “a global alert system, which we don’t have at large scale today,” allowing epidemics to be detected and responded to early, the letter said.
Rich countries now need to double down on spending for research and development, he said. That includes work on “mega-diagnostic” testing platforms, which Gates predicts could allow screening of more than 100 million people every week.
Such large-scale testing would be the backbone of the global alert system he envisions, where a rural health-care worker in Zambia or Bangladesh who notices unusual sickness could send specimens for rapid testing and genetic sequencing.
While the cost may sound high, billions spent on infrastructure and technology would represent a huge savings compared to the estimated $28 trillion global toll of COVID-19 and its associated economic fallout, he said.
That prospect of “immunity inequality,” where the wealthiest people get vaccines that don’t reach the world’s poorest populations, is deeply concerning, Melinda Gates said in her section of the letter.
“As things stand now, low- and middle-income countries will only be able to cover about one in five people … over the next year,” she wrote.
After the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, The Gates Foundation partnered with several governments to create CEPI — the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations — to accelerate vaccine development. That organization funded and trials on several COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.
Gates has long been sounding the alarm about pandemic dangers, including in a 2015 TED talk that has been viewed more than 39 million times. While it might have been easy to ignore those warnings when the last major outbreak was a century in the past, that’s no longer possible, he says.
The Gates Foundation has invested $1.75 billion in the fight against COVID-19 so far and pivoted much of its staff to pandemic-related projects. The funding helped support research on vaccines and promising treatments called monoclonal antibodies. Much of the money is earmarked to ensure developing countries don’t lose out as rich countries snap up supplies of vaccines and drugs.
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