The Microsoft co-founder updated the Late Show host on the progress being made to fight COVID-19
Thursday to provide viewers with some somber, reality-based accounting of how the medical community is progressing in the battle against COVID-19.to devote millions to coronavirus vaccine research through the foundation he co-founded with his wife,“One is if we get miracle therapeutics that are greater than 95% cure rate. We can’t count on that,” Gates said. “The other is a vaccine that’s highly effective that we get out to the world population.
But despite that glimmer of good news, Gates warned against becoming overconfident about the potential of a vaccine. “So even a year from now, if everything went perfectly—because we're backing 10 of the leading constructs—we could start the manufacturing. Then again, this disease could be hard to make a vaccine [for], so it could be more like two years,” Gates cautioned. “So quite a range of possibilities.
For years, Gates has warned about the dangers of a pandemic like the one currently uprooting the global economy and health care systems. “When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war,” Gatesduring an eerily prescient 2015 TED Talk. “Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
But the good news, he allowed, “is most of the work we’re going to do to be ready for pandemic two—I call this pandemic one—most of the work we’ll do to be ready for that are also the things we need to do to minimize the threat of bioterrorism.” There’s nothing like a happy ending, is there?
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