Shortly after Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, the pair set the daring goal of putting a “computer on every desk, in every home.” When the once unimaginable purpose came true, it propelled Gates to world fame and fortune, making his name synonymous with innovation and technology.
More than forty-five years after co-founding Microsoft and helping launch the information age, Bill Gates appears to remain steadfast in his commitment to innovate and solve the world’s most complicated problems, including those related to climate change, malaria and the Covid19 pandemic.
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Last March, two days after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, Gates announced plans to leave his seat on Microsoft’s board of directors to devote more time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic initiative. of the husband. and women team in 2000.
A voracious reader and consumer of information, Gates is often found plunging across folders of research into the world’s most pressing challenges, witnessed by 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper when he interviewed him.
In 2015, during the Ebola epidemic in Africa, Gates turned his attention to pandemic prevention, heeding a poignant warning in a 2015 TED Talk that has been viewed more than 72 million times on streaming platforms.
“If something kills more than 10 million people in the coming decades, it’s probably more of a highly contagious virus than a war,” Gates told the TED audience. “Not missiles, but microbes. Part of the reason for this is that we’ve invested a lot in nuclear deterrents. But we’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready yet. the next epidemic. “
Gates told 60 Minutes that the United States should have made a relatively nominal investment in developing diagnostic testing capacity for PCR before it became an urgent need.
“You could have rolled out the tests so quickly,” Gates told Cooper. “If you gain a month from having that capacity, it’s a very different epidemic for the country.”
Gates said there were “flaws” in the US response to the pandemic, but the country’s role in vaccine research and development has helped the world “immensely”.
So far, the Food and Drug Administration has only issued emergency use approval for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Both are mRNA-based vaccines and the first of their kind to be widely distributed outside of US clinical trials.
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Gates and his foundation have long been advocates of mRNA vaccine technology. He hopes using it to combat future medical needs is one of many innovations that will be gained in an otherwise challenging year.
A pandemic year of science and skeptics seeking to cast doubt on the research and expertise of leading scientists.
“We need to make the truth more interesting than the overly simplistic conspiracy,” Gates told 60 Minutes. “It may be necessary to slow down the crazy stuff. There is a need for innovation to think about how you draw these lines, and especially when you go out to expose to strangers something that could lead them into a series of falsehoods. Pull.”
At the age of 65, innovation remains a central force in Bill Gates’ life. Rather than basking in the success of a successful career, reflection is replaced by urgency and the desire to complete moonshot initiatives that can save millions of lives and ensure that his work will last for generations.
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“I don’t think inheritance motivates anyone,” Gates told Cooper. “I’m thinking, god, I have, you know, hopefully 20 to 30 years in which, you know, can we eradicate malaria in this time frame? Can we lay the groundwork for a climate solution in this time frame? So I feel a little bit of a feeling. of urgency that, you know, everything that I am no longer involved in after 30 years. “
The videos above were produced by Keith Zubrow and Sarah Shafer Prediger. They have been edited by Sarah Shafer Prediger.