Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

Fighting climate change is going to take international co-operation. We asked Bill Gates what lessons we’ve learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that could translate into the climate change fight. Here’s what he said:

“Hopefully, we’ve learned two lessons. One is that government needs experts to look out ahead to potentially very bad things that might happen in the future and help make sure that the government is spending the money — that’s an insurance policy so that you don’t have terrible things happen.

“You can’t wait until it happens and then just invent a single tool like a vaccine and get out of it. It’s just too pervasive (and there are) too many sources.

“I do a quarterly phone call with the CEOs to talk about anything they could be doing to help the pandemic. Can they share factories with each other, share technologies, share supplies of key ingredients, like adjuvants? I think the co-operation is there and a lot of the open science … shows that global co-operation can get something pretty miraculous done.”

Have the vaccines unrolled the way you were hoping?

“Yes. Both (Dr. Anthony Fauci) and I, in our comments in the spring and summer, tried not to create expectations around the best case. He and I both viewed the best case as an approval by the end of 2020. And in fact, Pfizer and Moderna were able to achieve that.

“The AstraZeneca that’s approved in some places, Johnson and Johnson, that’s just a few months away with any luck and Novavax, that’s a few months away, those three will do the bulk of the vaccination in middle-income and low-income countries.

“You know, (the Gates Foundation is) involved in all these. But we’re the ones who funded the big factory capacity in India to make the next three vaccines so that we’re not having to make trade-offs where rich countries are coming in and buying out all the capacity.”