The co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, whose foundation is heavily involved in the effort to develop and deliver COVID-19 vaccines, has issued a warning that the next four to six months could be the worst of the coronavirus pandemic.
“I thought the U.S. would do a better job handling it,” Mr. Gates, who in 2015 had warned the world of such a pandemic, said on Sunday.
“Sadly, the next four to six months could be the worst of the pandemic. The IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) forecast shows over 200,000 additional deaths. If we would follow the rules, in terms of wearing masks and not mixing, we could avoid a large percentage of those deaths,” Mr. Gates, the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, told CNN.
“Overall, when I did the forecasts in 2015, I talked about the deaths potentially being higher. So, this virus could be more fatal than it is. We didn’t get the worst-case. But the thing that has surprised me is that the economic impact in the U.S. and around the world has been much greater than the forecasts that I made five years ago,” he said.
Gates said that his foundation had been funding a lot of the research for the vaccines and is working very hard to ensure that people get the vaccine.
“We’re very agile. We’re a partner in a thing called CEPI, which is the second biggest funder after the U.S. government,” he said.
“So, in diagnostics, therapy and vaccines, we know where the science is, we know how the pieces need to come together in an urgent way. And so our expertise in infectious disease, which normally only relates to developing countries, applied to the entire world for this crisis,” he added.
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