“We’ll be studying the mistakes the CDC actually made, and then the muzzling of the CDC, for years to come'
Bill Gates. Photo: Jeff Pachoud/AFP via Getty Images Every year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation releases a Goalkeepers report, tracking the world’s progress toward the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. The news is almost always pretty good. This year’s edition is … not like that. “Almost every time we have opened our mouths or put pen to paper,” the Gateses write in the report’s introduction, “we have celebrated decades of historic progress in fighting poverty and disease.
It’s a super-good question. As you say, the gradual progress in literacy and reducing malnutrition, reducing childhood death, extending life spans — that largely goes unnoticed, and it’s the most amazing story there is. This year, it’s just bad news.In the very best case, two years from now, you would be, for some of the health things in particular, ideally back at where you were at the beginning of 2020.
I saw one analysis suggesting the disease was 10,000 times more deadly for a 90-year-old than a 9-year-old. So — how did this happen? In the U.S., we’ve been so focused on the failures in the White House and the inability to put together a national strategy. And obviously that has been a failure. But we’ve also had failures at the FDA, particularly in its supervision of testing, and the CDC, particularly in its muddled guidance on things like mask-wearing. And while the U.S.
South Korea is an amazing story of contact tracing. They thought, “Hey, who has PCR machines?” And they got testing to be free and quick, and they never had long turnarounds on tests. That’s a unique U.S. stupidity, that we let the commercial guys get so rich on these tests that they take backlogs. There was no benefit to paying anybody for a test that takes more than 24 hours.
I haven’t looked at Cambodia. I haven’t looked at Myanmar. Certainly South Asia is really bad. The India epidemic is a horrific epidemic. They just became No. 2. They passed Brazil in terms of number of cases, and they test less per capita. So it’s —About Asia broadly, there is this theory that cross-protection in that part of the world is higher because there’s more bats in that part of the world and so more coronaviruses have escaped and people there will have more cross-protection.
You were talking about being ready for the next pandemic. I’m curious how you think about the next phase of this one. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which you’re involved with, put out this much-talked-about projection a few days ago suggesting that 400,000 Americans could die by the end of the year.
Of course, time is always on your side, in that if you get a really bad epidemic, then you get a lot of natural immunity with unknown duration.Almost certainly it’s in the multi-year timeframe for most people.
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