Bill Gates Predictions Past And Future

Video Transcript:

IHME forecast shows over 200,000 additional deaths. If we would follow the rules in terms of wearing masks and not mixing, we could avoid large percentage of those deaths. So in the near term, it's bad news. But the next four to six months really call on us to do our best because we can see that this will end and you don't want somebody you love to be the last to die of coronavirus. I thought the United States would do a better job handling it. Overall, when I did the forecast in 2015, I talked about the deaths potentially being hired. So this virus could be more fatal than it is. We didn't get the worst case. But the thing that surprised me is that the economic impact in the US and around the world has been much greater than the forecasts that I made five years ago. I think we need to help all of humanity here. We want the world to be going, we want to minimize the deaths. And the basic technology is a German company. So blocking international sharing and cooperation has been disruptive and a mistake during this entire pandemic. So we need to ramp up the capacity of all the vaccines. There will be some additional ones approved in the months ahead that are easier to scale up the manufacturing. But the US has benefited from other countries' work here and we shouldn't be entirely selfish in how we go forward. The extreme idea that everybody should die until we have the very last American vaccinated, that's hardly the appropriate response. Certainly by the summer will be way closer to normal than we are now. But even through early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccination rates in our country, the risk of reintroduction will be there and of course the global economy will be slowed down, which hurts America economically in a pretty dramatic way. So we'll have, starting in the summer, about nine months where a few things like big public gatherings will still be restricted. But we can see now that somewhere between 12 to 18 months, and we have a chance if we manage it well to get back to normal. I think we have a real communications challenge that you've got to find out who do people trust, make sure they've got the data. I hope as people see it being rolling, this vaccine rolled out and reducing the death rate, reducing transmission to people you care about, that that 60% number will go up. The track record will be developed and I think will get over the 70% that should reduce the transmission dramatically. Let's take a look. First we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%.