What Bill Gates Thinks About the State of the Fight Against COVID-19

Bill Gates isn’t about to be contemplating his touchdown dance yet. You don’t get to devote your life to battling the world’s most intractable problems by declaring victory before a fight is over. But in a letter Gates released this morning, headlined, “These breakthroughs will make 2021 better than 2020,” it’s clear that the co-director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is feeling pretty sanguine about the year ahead—particularly when it comes to COVID-19. The Gates letter, which comes a month before the expected January release of Melinda Gates’s Annual Letter, sees a lot to be optimistic about in the recent course of the pandemic—as well as a number of things to remain wary about. Clearly, Gates takes heart in the recent emergency use authorization of both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, as well as by the straightforward and decidedly lower-tech truth that face masks and distancing remain exceedingly effective in slowing the spread of the virus as the vaccines are being rolled out. “When I think back on the pace of scientific advances in 2020, I am stunned,” he writes. “Humans have never made more progress on any disease in a year than the world did on COVID-19 this year.” The Gates Foundation itself can take some credit for that breakneck pace, having been funding research on the mRNA technology that underlies both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines since 2014. Not only i...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news