In a
recent candid interview, Bill Gates outlined that, despite the comparatively
small threat of Coronavirus, he and his colleagues “don’t want a lot of
recovered people” who have acquired natural immunity. They instead are hoping
we become reliant on vaccines and anti-viral medication.
Shockingly,
Gates also suggests people be made to have a digital ID showing their
vaccination status, and that people without this “digital immunity proof” would
not be allowed to travel. Such an approach would mean very big money for
vaccine producers.
On March 24 Bill Gates gave a highly revelatory 50-minute
interview (above) to Chris Anderson. Anderson is the
Curator of TED, the non-profit that runs the TED Talks.
The Gates interview is the second in a new series of
daily ‘Ted Connects’ interviews
focused on COVID-19. The series’s website says that:
TED
Connects: Community and Hope is a free, live, daily conversation series
featuring experts whose ideas can help us reflect and work through this
uncertain time with a sense of responsibility, compassion and wisdom.”
Anderson asked Gates at 3:49 in the video of
the interview – which is quickly climbing to three million views – about a ‘Perspective’ article by
Gates that was published February 28 in the New
England Journal of Medicine.
“You
wrote that this could be the once-in-a-century pandemic that people have been
fearing. Is that how you think of it, still?” queried Anderson.
“Well,
it’s awful to say this but, we could have a respiratory virus whose case
fatality rate was even higher. If this was something like smallpox, that kills
30 percent of people. So this is horrific,” responded Gates.
“But,
in fact, most people even who get the COVID disease are able to survive. So in
that, it’s quite infectious – way more infectious than MERS [Middle East
Respiratory Syndrome] or SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] were. [But]
it’s not as fatal as they were. And yet the disruption we’re seeing in order to
knock it down is really completely unprecedented.”
Gates reiterates the dire consequences for the global
economy later in the interview.
“We
need a clear message about that,” Gates
said starting at 26:52.
“It
is really tragic that the economic effects of this are very dramatic. I mean,
nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But …
bringing the economy back and doing [sic] money, that’s more of a reversible
thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the
economic dimension, huge pain, in order to minimize the pain in disease and death
dimension.”
However, this goes directly against the imperative to
balance the benefits and costs of the screening, testing and treatment measures
for each ailment – as successfully promulgated for years by, for example,
the Choosing Wisely campaign –
to provide the maximum benefit to individual patients and society as a whole.
Even more importantly, as noted in an April 1 article in OffGuardian,
there may be dramatically more deaths from the economic breakdown than from
COVID-19 itself.
“By
all accounts, the impact of the response will be great, far-reaching, and
long-lasting,”
Kevin Ryan wrote in the article. Ryan estimated that well
over two million people will likely die from the sequelae of the lock-downs and
other drastic measures to enforce ‘social distancing.’
Millions could potentially die from suicide, drug abuse,
lack of medical coverage or treatment, poverty and lack of food access, on top
of other predictable social, medical and public-health problems stemming from
the response to COVID-19.
Gates and Anderson did not touch on any of those
sequelae. Instead, they focused on rapidly ramping up testing and medical
interventions for COVID-19.
Gates said at 30:29 in the
interview that he and a large team are moving fast to test anti-virals,
vaccines and other therapeutics and to bring them to market as quickly as
possible.
The
Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust with support from Mastercard and now
others, created this therapeutic accelerator to really triage out [candidate
therapeutics]…You have hundreds of people showing up and saying, ‘Try this, try
that.’ So we look at lab assays, animal models, and so we understand which
things should be prioritized for these very quick human trials that need to be
done all over the world.”
The accelerator was launched March 10 with
approximately $125 million in seed funding. Three days later Gates left Microsoft.
Not long before that, on January 23, Gates’s organization
the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) announced it will
fund three programs to develop COVID-19 vaccines. These are the advancing of
DNA-vaccine candidates against MERS and Lassa fever, the development of a “‘molecular
clamp’ platform” that “enables
targeted and rapid vaccine production against multiple viral pathogens,” and the manufacture and Phase 1 clinical study of
an mRNA vaccine against COVID.
“The
programmes will leverage rapid response platforms already supported by CEPI as
well as a new partnership. The aim is to advance nCoV-2019 vaccine candidates
into clinical testing as quickly as possible,” according to a news release.
Then at 32:50 in the video, Anderson
asked whether the blood serum from people who have recovered from a COVID
infection can be used to treat others.
“I
heard you mention that one possibility might be treatments from the serum, the
blood serum of people who had had the disease and then recovered. So I guess
they’re carrying antibodies,” said Anderson. “Talk a bit about that and how
that could work and what it would take to accelerate that.”
[Note that Anderson did not ask Gates about, instead,
just letting most of the population – aside from people most vulnerable to
serious illness from the infection, who should be quarantined — be exposed to
COVID-19 and as a result very likely recover and develop life-long immunity.
As at least one expert has
observed, “as much as ninety-nine percent of active cases [of COVID-19] in
the general population are ‘mild’ and do not require specific medical
treatment” to recover.]
“This
has always been discussed as, ‘How could you pull that off?’” replied Gates. “So
people who are recovered, it appears, have very effective antibodies in their
blood. So you could go, transfuse them and only take out white cells, the
immune cells.”
However, Gates continued, he and his colleagues have
dismissed that possibility because it’s “fairly complicated –
compared to a drug we can make in high volume, you know, the cost of taking it
out and putting it back in probably doesn’t scale as well.”
Then a few seconds later, at 33:45, Gates drops another
bomb:
We
don’t want to have a lot of recovered people […] To be clear, we’re trying –
through the shut-down in the United States – to not get to one percent of the
population infected. We’re well below that today, but with exponentiation, you
could get past that three million [people or approximately one percent of the
U.S. population being infected with COVID-19 and the vast majority recovering].
I believe we will be able to avoid that with having this economic pain.”
It appears that rather than let the population be exposed
to the virus and most develop antibodies that give them natural, long-lasting
immunity to COVID-19, Gates and his colleagues far prefer to create a vast,
hugely expensive, new system of manufacturing and selling billions of test
kits, and in parallel very quickly developing and selling billions of
antivirals and vaccines.
And then, when the virus comes back again a few months
later and most of the population is unexposed and therefore vulnerable, selling
billions more test kits and medical interventions.
Right after that, at 34:14, Gates talked about
how he sees things rolling out from there.
Eventually
what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a
vaccinated person […] Because you don’t want people moving around the world
where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You
don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come
back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof
that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
[Sometime on the afternoon of March 31 the last sentence
of this quote was edited out of the official TED video of the interview.
Fortunately, recordings of the complete interview are archived elsewhere.]
In the October 2019 Event 201 novel-corona virus-pandemicsimulation
co-sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic
Forum and a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a
poll that was part of the simulation said that 65% of people in the U.S. would
be eager to take a vaccine for COVID-19, “even if it’s experimental.”
This will be tremendously lucrative.
Vaccines are very big business: this Feb. 23 CNBC article,
for example, describes the vaccine market as six times bigger than it was 20
years ago, at more than $35 billion annually today, and providing a $44 return
for every $1 invested in the world’s 94 lowest-income countries.
Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which
has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World
Health Organization (WHO) since 2000, according to a 2017Politico article. (While over the
same time frame countries have reduced their contributions to the world body,
particularly after the 2008-2009 depression, and now account for less than
one-quarter of the WHO’s budget.) The WHO is now coordinating
approximately 50 groups around
the world that are working on candidate vaccines against COVID-19.
The Politico article quotes a Geneva-based NGO representative as
saying Gates is “treated liked a head of state, not only at the WHO, but
also at the G20,” and that Gates is
one of the most influential people in global health.
Meanwhile, officials around the world are doing their
part to make sure everyone social distances, self-isolates and/or stays locked
down.
For example, here’s Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health,
Dr. Eileen de Villa, at her and Toronto Mayor John Tory’s March 30 press
briefing:
“We
find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. We should expect some more
people will get sick – and for some, sadly, will die. This is why it is so
important to stay at home to reduce virus spread. And to protect front-line
workers, healthcare workers and our essential workers, so they can continue to
protect us. People shouldn’t have to die, people shouldn’t have to risk death
taking care of us because others won’t practice social distancing or physical
distancing.”
Yet look how close Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of
Health, Dr. David Williams, is sitting to Haley Chazan, Senior Manager, Media
Relations, for Christine Elliott, Deputy Premier and Minister of Health of
Ontario.
This was on Friday, March 27, just before the start of
that day’s daily press conference by Dr. Williams and Ontario’s Associate
Medical Officer of Health Dr. Barbara Yaffe:
They were sitting two seats, or just a couple of feet,
apart. A short time later Chazan got up and stood even closer to Dr. Williams
for a little while:
Dr. Williams and Chazan do not live together. Rather, Dr.
Williams very likely knows – just as Gates knows – that there is little if any
reason to worry about being in close contact with other people unless you or
they are vulnerable to developing a severe illness from COVID-19. He surely
knows, also, that if you contract COVID-19 and you’re otherwise healthy you’ll
very likely have few symptoms, if any, and recover quickly. And that this
exposure in fact is beneficial because in the process you will develop
antibodies to the virus and have natural, long-lasting immunity to it.
Yet in the March 27 press conference, just like all the
others he has participated in during the COVID-19 crisis, Dr. Williams lectured
the public about maintaining social distancing. He told people not to go
outside on the coming weekend to enjoy the nice weather because, otherwise,
they might walk past someone and not be two metres apart.
Dr. Williams is among the large cadre of powerful
officials who’ve crashed the global economy by forcing tens of millions of
small- and medium-sized businesses to close in the name of the need for forced,
severe, social distancing and lock-downs.
They’ve shattered society, suspended most civil liberties
and prohibited most activities and connections that keep people mentally and
physically healthy. At the same time the officials have prioritized COVID-19
care over everything else and, as a result, severely limited billions of
people’s access to life-saving healthcare services ranging from acquiring
medication and blood transfusions to having organ transplants and cancer
surgeries.
Rosemary
Frei has an MSc in molecular biology from a faculty of medicine and was a
freelance medical journalist for 22 years. She is now an independent
investigative journalist in Canada. You can find her recent detailed
investigative analysis of COVID here and
follow her on Twitter.
