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Language: en
so how did it feel to make this
prediction and then
have the world essentially not listen
and not prepare
well there's no good feeling that comes
on something like this saying i told you
so
if anything kills over 10 million people
in the next few decades
it's most likely to be a highly
infectious virus
rather than a war you know i just think
back of could i have been more
a bit more persuasive we've actually
invested very little
in a system to stop an epidemic
we're not ready for the next epidemic
how did you make such a prescient
prediction how did you know this was
going to happen
well there's a number of respiratory
viruses and from time to time one will
come along
that's very transmissive and causes some
level of fatalities
respiratory diseases are very scary
because you're still
walking around on a plane a bus
when you're infectious unlike some other
diseases like ebola where you're mostly
in a hospital bed by the time the viral
load
impacts other people hey so
recently i got the chance to interview
bill gates when his foundation's annual
letter came out i'll link to it in the
description
and we talked about lots of things
including conspiracy theories and
misinformation
but about the pandemic i wanted to know
if so many people could see this coming
and the costs of prevention were
relatively small
then why wasn't more done about it
well there's some risks like earthquakes
where we see small earthquakes all the
time
or you know the history of war or fire
or hurricanes so you don't forget these
pandemics only come along so irregularly
that being lulled into a sense of
security where it probably won't be a
problem in the next few years why should
we put money into that
uh you don't buy the insurance policy
basically
this one will uh help us understand it
needs to be a priority
i feel like humans have an issue though
with fighting the last battle
potentially so
if we focus on pandemics now and there
isn't one say for another hundred years
what is the next disaster what is the
one that we're not prepared for
well i'd point out two one is climate
change
every year that would be a death toll
even greater uh than we've had in this
pandemic
also related to pandemics is something
people don't like to talk about much
which is bioterrorism that
somebody who wants to cause damage could
engineer
uh a virus and so that means the cost
the chance of running into this is more
than just the naturally cost epidemics
like
uh the current one it feels to me like
there's something similar about
pandemics and you know climate change or
like asteroid impact which is that you
know they're not very
tangible but you could do a little bit i
don't know it seems like humans are not
very good at those
sorts of problems well my favorite
writer voslav smeal
you know wrote about all the potential
kinds of disasters like you know
the risk of an asteroid the risk of a
you know yellowstone-like
eruption and in fact he showed that
pandemics
were significantly the biggest thing
other than a human-caused nuclear war
uh that we needed to be more prepared
for
so what changes do we put in place to
be readier for the next one and is it
possible that cova 19 could be the last
global pandemic well certainly there
will be more pandemics the
in ways that humans interact with other
species these viruses are coming across
a species barrier whether it's from bats
or
uh monkeys or but you don't think we
could increase our preparedness to such
a level that
it never sort of becomes this global
issue
we could increase our preparedness so we
never have a death hole
uh anywhere near what we have today you
know pandemics can be worse in terms of
the fatality smallpox was a
over 30 fatality you know so a little
bit we were lucky that the fatality here
is not
not super high but we can nip it in the
bud it'll still
get to a lot of countries but the number
of deaths you know
uh with the right system should be a
tenth of what we we've seen here
and the systems that you want to put in
place so this
sort of so you can nip it in the butt or
what are the key elements
that we didn't have that we should have
going forward i would divide it into two
sections there's the
field based activity in the r d activity
in r d uh we need to mature mrna
so we can make it even faster and have
factories all over the world
have it be cheap and thermal stable
there's a lot that can go into
therapeutics including antibodies
on diagnostics having the ability to
give
10 million pcr tests a day then in terms
of the field we need
a lot of diagnostic machines all over
the world
we need a team of epidemiologists so the
investments are about equal between
r d uh and the the field based group
uh and information that should be
constantly flowing
you know i feel like there's a meta
issue that is kind of above
all of these issues which is you know
the way that people connect with
reality and figure out what's true and
what's not and you know what information
to believe
i've got to say that you know as i was
growing up and coming into this
information age
it seemed like the internet and all
these tools were going to make
the correct information so much more
easy to access and
bring us into a more fact-based world
instead it doesn't look as though it's
bringing us there
i wonder if you shared a similar vision
for
you know what the internet might do for
all of us and
i don't know if you have any thoughts
about the current state of it you know
how do we deal with this
well the internet has done something
fantastic which is if you want to learn
you know the people who watch you are
you know getting an opportunity to
understand
science and what's going on and that
just wasn't there
uh and so for a lot of people they're
so much more informed i mean i have
friends who ask me about these variants
where i'm just stunned at
how up to date they are with the latest
information so
for people who want to learn facts this
is a golden age you know we focus on the
negative part with some of these
conspiracy theories and anti-factual
things
and so because social media is so new
figuring out how you curb that
you know labeling it restrict the speed
of spread of things that are titillating
but faults
we are missing some good ideas to uh
you know not have this kind of uh scary
uh phenomena that in the case of
anti-vaccine things may
slow down how quickly we get lots of
people
to take the vaccine and therefore extend
the epidemic and and cost us in
in tens of thousands of lives it feels
like you're running up against you know
kind of that
great american principle of free speech
right i think it's
it's a great point you bring up that you
know in the past the problem was kind of
scarcity getting access to this
sort of information and now it's sort of
a problem of too much
and figuring out which is the good stuff
and which is not well there are
certainly
clear things like you know saying
completely false things about you know
vaccines but there is kind of a grayer
in the middle
that figuring out what the rules are and
who should be the one looking and
interpreting those rules wow we are
missing that today
you know can you get a group of experts
that are weighing in on these things you
don't really want the profit motive
involved
uh but you want uh
you know expertise and capacity and so
you know a few years from now i hope
we're more sophisticated on
uh what how that line should be drawn
you know a while back on my second
channel i made a video called
be hated which was kind of about my
thoughts about pushing back against
misinformation that we should
see anything that is wrong in the world
and we should do our best to fight it so
you should not be liked by everyone
because there are some people out there
with bad ideas and you should be pushing
back against them that was essentially
my thought but since then i feel like my
views have softened a little
and now i think of our pushing back
against misinformation a little bit like
an immune system
obviously it's a problem if your immune
system is weak if
it doesn't respond to anything but it's
also a problem if your immune system is
too strong you know during the 1918
flu pandemic there's a really
interesting distribution of
deaths where the young and old were more
likely to die obviously because they
have weak immune systems
but also people in the sort of 25 to 35
year old range because their immune
systems were just so
strong they were overactive and that
ended up
resulting in mortality so i feel like
there's a sweet spot in terms of how
much we push back against misinformation
you know you'll never see me make a
video about
flat earthers because i just don't see
the point
you know making that video only kind of
reconfirms their world view and there's
there's not really any minds to move
there
so that's kind of how i'm
conceptualizing this information these
days
um a bit like we have to be a targeted
immune system
so i wanted to push bill a bit further
on this idea
and i brought up a tweet that i had seen
doing the rounds on twitter
that basically said that the oxford
vaccine development they were going to
open source that vaccine until
the bill and melinda gates foundation
got involved and said
no you must partner exclusively with a
big pharma company astrazeneca
and so obviously it seems to the people
on twitter that something nefarious was
going on there
but i wanted to know from bill what was
the real story
well the making of safe vaccine
is more complicated than say making a
jet engine
and people are very picky about
vaccines in fact you could ruin the
reputation of vaccines if you're making
them in factories
where the quality control at every stage
is not exquisite
and you know any mistake you know you
can have that factory shut down
literally for months
at a time when its output is needed to
save millions of lives
so vaccine factories are not something
that you just
you know uh you know like open source
code that you can take and you know mess
around with
and so the the limitations on how many
vaccines are being made
that's based on how many great capable
vaccine manufacturers there are in the
world
and we've made sure that the astrazeneca
has been made in these big indian
factories and there's no royalty for
that
no charge at all now we've had to fund
that the gates foundation
these are companies we've been working
on their factory quality for over a
decade
uh so that there was spare capacity to
make inexpensive vaccines
so oxford university is
is wonderful but they're not capable of
doing a phase three trial
and they they don't have factories we
did tell
oxford that they needed to seek somebody
with expertise
uh and astrazeneca came in and we didn't
control that agreement but they came in
and said hey they want to do it on a
non-profit basis
and i'm impressed with how they put
their best people on it and helped out
you know the pharma companies didn't who
didn't get involved
nobody's criticizing them so you know
you feel sorry for the ones that are
really
uh miraculously uh helping make these
vaccines
these are the very good reasons that i
suspect exist but
that that's where i feel like social
media just doesn't get the nuance and
and uh you know it pains me to see the
world like that
um any and you know even to see you bill
you know be the target of some of these
conspiracy theories
it seems to not bother you but you know
it kind of bothers me as
as a guy who wants you know everyone to
live in the same kind of reality and
you know i i see they're doing great
things and and i think that
you know that should be commended as
opposed to what you get i'm not in a
position to complain much you know i
i have a lot of things that uh you know
make me extremely lucky
and you know i hope these conspiracy
theories go away and i don't know what
what it'll mean for the future how do
you feel about the vaccine roll out so
far
well we you know we need the supply we
need the logistics and we need the
demand
and there are huge challenges in each of
those
i'm hopeful that johnson and johnson in
the next month will get approved because
that's a single dose vaccine
very cheap highly scalable so after
seneca johnson and johnson and a few
months later novavax most of the
developing world those are the vaccines
that will be going to them
and so we put billions into trying to
make that happen and
you know in a few months hopefully it'll
come together
you