Microsoft Corporation Co-founder and Philanthropist, William Gates III, popularly known as Bill Gates has said that the world has come this far because governments did not prepare for such a time.
According to him, this was not done because governments rather prioritized engaging in wars instead of preparing for such times as he had predicted earlier.
Read Also: Is it easy as the word sounds? Gifty shares her experience in quarantine.
In an interview on the BBC, the millionaire, who has attested to the fact that finding what he calls “a safe and effective vaccine” will cost billions of dollars in a “trial and error process” said the current situation could have been solved greatly with the help of government policies that supported the private sector.
“Well, it’s got to be governments because there’s no private sector incentive for something that’s uncertain like this. And even when it happens, you have to charge mostly a break-even price for things that are helping out with a global crisis like this. So you know, people saw war as something to fund and less than 10% of that would have been needed for this. People just didn’t organize their government to have that function” he said
Describing the pandemic as something dramatic, Bill Gates said although the world will recover from this, there is some more ahead, as “we have multiple stages to go through”.
“…this has been so dramatic, you know, we weren’t ready for this pandemic but I do think we will be ready for the next pandemic and using the new tools of science, that’s very very doable.” he said.
Things Will Go Back To The Normal And Economies Will Recover
He is of a firm believe that after this pandemic, the world would have learnt a lesson that will make it ready for future pandemics which can be effectively tackled through the use of innovation. According Bill Gates, the world will bounce back and economies will be restored after a vaccine is finally found.
He also talked about how this time affords us the opportunity to put some important things in place saying “Once you have a safe and effective vaccine, get that out to almost all the people on the planet and build the preparatory system for the next pandemic, so you can nip it in the bud, we will go back to the normal and economies will recover. But we have multiple stages to go through…till we have that, how much can we open up? How can we help the developing countries? And innovation will help us not be at such a risk in the years after that”
