Bill Gates highlights the importance of finding a vaccine and a cure against COVID-19

As many already know, tech billionaire Bill Gates has stepped down from the Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway boards to focus his time on finding a vaccine and a cure against the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated over $100 million to fund the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator project, which is an endeavor that strives to quicken the research and development of a cure for COVID-19.

And in Bill's recent interview with world-famous TV host Ellen DeGeneres, he reiterated why it's crucial to find a COVID-19 vaccine and how it will affect the world's chances of returning to 'normal life'.

What went wrong?

In Bill's TED talk in 2015, he warned everyone about getting ready for the next epidemic. Unfortunately, his warnings did not exactly result in everyone springing into action.

He told Ellen, “Well, the goal of the 2015 talk and the detailed article in the New England Journal of Medicine was so that the government would do the work to be ready for the next epidemic. And that would have meant that we would have had diagnostics very quickly, drugs very quickly, and even a vaccine, all of those things, dramatically faster than what we're going through here.

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“But only about 5% of what should have been done to get ready for this - because this is even, you know, worse than war. And yet the amount that was put into it, the amount we practiced and had the ability to make these tools, virtually nothing was done.”

Any chance of returning to 'normal' soon?

Bill foresees that there's a chance that the world may get back into a semi-normal life by June if the quarantines and testings are done right. But he also emphasized that the world won't fully return to normal until a vaccine or a cure against COVID-19 is developed.

“Until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won't be fully back to normal.

“Some things, like restaurants, will probably have more spacing, and the demand will be reduced because of what we've all gone through here. But we need to start getting things back to normal.

“They won't be back to normal until we either have that phenomenal vaccine or a therapeutic that's like over 95% effective. And so we have to assume that's going to be almost 18 months from now.

“I wish that all our jobs could be done from home as well as your job and my job, you know? But for people who are in restaurants or factories or construction or cleaning, you know, they are looking at their livelihood going away.

“And so, sadly, like many bad things, those who are in the toughest circumstances are going to bear most of the pain.

“And so we really want to get into this semi-normal phase as soon as we can. And then, the vaccine is the thing that will change things.”

What the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing about it?

Bill has revealed that everyone in all their grantees has refocused their time and energy in developing a vaccine and a cure for COVID-19, at the expense of putting other important health issues in the back burner for now.

“We've re-prioritized and everybody in all our grantees now prioritizes this coronavirus work. So, you know, even polio eradication, we're not able to work on that, or new drugs for HIV.

“But that skill set is very applicable to helping pick which drugs should go into trials and which vaccines we should build factories for so that if one proves safe and efficacious, we can make billions of doses.

“And that's why, you know, (I'm) really figuring out how do we make sure it's safe? Because when you give it to seven billion healthy people, that's super important.“

The takeaway from this pandemic

Although Bill considers the COVID-19 pandemic to be 'worse than war,' he believes that there are positive things that could be born out of it.

“Well, I feel very confident that this time we won't ignore the potential for the next epidemic. That this is such a dramatic thing that, you know, has reshaped our lives and the economy and created so many tragedies; we will get ready. And the work we do there will have benefits to other infectious diseases as well.

“I also think we have great examples of heroics where people are stepping up, where communities are coming together to solve these problems.

“And so although it's very bad news and almost a kind of worst-case scenario, the ingenuity of people, the compassion of people, you know, the amount they're giving of their time and money, I think, you know, hopefully, this will renew our sense that we're kind of in this together…you know, in our communities and our country and in the world.”

For more news on the Coronavirus Disease pandemic, go to GMA Network's COVID-19 page.

And for updates regarding the enhanced community quarantine, go to the ECQ page.

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