Bill Gates Is So Over This Pandemic

The group would monitor potential outbreaks, develop close relationships with public health officials around the world, and oversee drills to prepare for the inevitable—and potentially even worse—sequels to Covid.The insistent optimism he brought to this idea and much of his speech was nothing like the bleak alarm of his 2015 TED talk, a jeremiad about our lack of preparedness for an imminent pandemic. That presentation has garnered 43 million views on the TED site; unfortunately, he says, 90 percent of them came after Covid made his prediction tragically accurate.“The most profound thing that’s going to happen in software is to have truly intelligent agents. Only days after our interview did I learn that the Cohortes Vigilum failed to contain the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD, a fact I definitely would have asked him about had I known.I have interviewed Gates dozens of times, and as the years go on, I find he is more likely to employ the pointed (and often funny) sarcasm he used to only display privately or in internal meetings. But they always ended up being just desktop simulations, where you don't really call up the diagnostic companies and see if they can give you PCR machines, or you don't really say, “Let's impose a quarantine—where are we going to put 3,000 people, and how are we going to enforce it?” When the military or the fire department do drills, they do physical, in-the-world exercises.It's about the importance of practice. For plenty of TED-sters (vaccinated, boosted, roughly 65 years old), the chance of dying after a Covid infection is 6,000 micromorts—“a little more risky than one year of active service in Afghanistan in 2011,” she wrote.]Are you saying the pandemic is essentially over, at least for rich countries?No, it's not over. So when you say to them, “Hey, number 15,” they're like, “Well, what about number one, number two, number three, number four—show me some dead bodies!”I love these articles that say, “Hey, if these countries don't vaccinate themselves, they're going to generate variants and screw us.” There's not much science to support that.Wait, you're saying that vaccinating globally wouldn't reduce the chances of a more dangerous variant?What science do you have that suggests that? “Anybody who says that vaccinating as many people as possible is not important in preventing variants is making a mistake,” says Brilliant.]I've been struck by the pushback on vaccines. A University of Michigan study of the last 35 years reported that acceptance of evolution became the majority opinion in 2016.]People weren't taking to the streets or blocking borders to demonstrate against biologists like they are with vaccines.We're not a broadly scientific debating society. Are you sure that we went backward?Well, you've been the object of criticism for years, but before the pandemic very few people were marching around outside and calling for your arrest or execution.Now I'm a focus. The years when we grew up and conducted our careers were, for some people, a sort of a golden age in this country.Would you have wanted to be a gay person 40 years ago?