SensNews Aug 2020

21 Sensor100 August 2020 Bill Gates on Covid: Most USTests Are ‘Completely Garbage’ An early Cassandra who warned of our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, he became one of the most credible figures as his founda- tion made huge investments in vaccines, treat- ments, and testing. He also became a target of the plague of misinformation afoot in the land, as logorrheic critics accused him of planning to inject microchips in vaccine recipients. (Fact check: false. In case you were wondering.) At this point, are you optimistic? Yes.You have to admit there’s been trillions of dollars of economic damage done and a lot of debts, but the innovation pipeline on scaling up diagnostics, on new therapeutics, on vaccines is actually quite impressive.And that makes me feel like, for the rich world, we should largely be able to end this thing by the end of 2021, and for the world at large by the end of 2022.That is only because of the scale of the innovation that’s taking place. Now whenever we get this done, we will have lost many years in malaria and polio and HIV and the indebtedness of countries of all sizes and instability. It’ll take you years beyond that before you’d even get back to where you were at the start of 2020. It’s notWorldWar I orWorldWar II, but it is in that order of magnitude as a negative shock to the system. Read the full interview: Wired 08 July