Bill Gates publishes new book on dealing with pandemics

In his new book, Bill Gates draws lessons from the fight against the Covid 19 pandemic and defends himself against his critics.

Bill Gates poses backstage before his conversation with Fareed Zakaria about his book ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic’ on May 3, 2022 in New York.

Evan Agostini/AP

(dpa) On a Friday evening in February 2020, it became clear to him that the outbreak of a novel corona virus that had just become known “would grow into a global catastrophe,” writes Bill Gates. He then reacted as always when something worried him: He started talking to a lot of experts about the topic, getting information and assessments from them.

What Gates has learned in the past two years, he has now written down – to prevent a repetition. “How we can prevent the next pandemic” is the name of the work that was published in German at the same time as the English original by Piper-Verlag.

Obsession for contagious diseases

The subject is no stranger to the 66-year-old. Infectious diseases are “a kind of obsession” for him, writes the Microsoft founder and billionaire. He could spend hours reading books and scientific articles on the subject, or hanging around on websites with data collections. For decades he has been involved with his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the fight against polio, AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases.

“The world has never really invested in the tools it needs or systematically prepared for a pandemic,” Gates concludes. “It’s high time we changed that.” He sees the following steps as most important: A pandemic prevention team must be set up, the early detection of outbreaks must work better, people must be helped more quickly and better to protect themselves, the search for new active ingredients must be accelerated and vaccine production must be prepared – and all of this has to be practiced, well planned and financed.

The foundation, which he runs together with his now separated wife Melinda, has so far donated more than two billion dollars to prevent and fight the pandemic, especially in poorer countries.

criticism of Trump

Gates writes that none of this is revolutionary knowledge, but that some of it was shockingly disregarded in the corona pandemic, even in rich countries. President Trump and his senior advisers downplayed the pandemic and gave profoundly bad advice to the populace. It’s unbelievable, but the federal authorities refused to share data with each other.” On the other hand, countless helpers around the world, for example in hospitals, have done “heroic work”.

Gates has no understanding for the ongoing disparagement, especially by opponents of vaccination and conspiracy theorists. Gates wrote that he was “amazed” at how often he had become the “object of wild conspiracy theories”. “While this isn’t a new experience for me, odd ideas about Microsoft have been floating around for decades.” But today the attacks are more violent.

“I never really knew whether I should react to such ideas or not. If I ignore them, they just keep spreading. But can I really convince people who believe in such conspiracy theories if I say publicly: “I’m not interested in tracking your movements, I don’t give a damn where you go or drive, and in vaccines there really isn’t any Motion tracker?»»

In any case, according to Gates, he decided to just continue with his work in the future and hope “that the truth will outlive the lies”.

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