The Times Magazine 15with them both dancing to Harry Styles.
Bill clearly loves being a dad. “My eldest
is in medical school, so there’s all sorts of
fun things to talk about. My middle child
studies international relations so he and
I have endless conversations, and my youngest
is the most up to date on songs, people and
websites. It’s great. I miss the mess and the
noise. I don’t do too many domestic chores
myself, but in the normal days I always did
the dishes because that was something I was
good at, and one of the kids would help me
out. Now it’s either restaurant or door dash
or somebody who comes in and helps.”
For much of the past two years, he
stresses, he has been focused on beating
Covid. Gates’s ability to read the future has
always been uncanny, so he wasn’t surprised
when a mystery illness in Wuhan forced
the whole world into lockdown. Three
years ago, I asked him what kept him awake
at night. “The thought of a pandemic,” he
replied immediately. He even gave a TED
Talk in 2015 warning of a supervirus. We all
dismissed his worries at the time. He must feel
vindicated now. “If the pandemic hadn’t come
along it would have been a fairly obscure TED
Talk. Now it’s been watched 43 million times.
Everyone who works in infectious diseases
just has this fear of human transmissible
respiratory viruses. The more people travel
and the stronger the interaction between wild
species and humans, the more risk of zoonotic
cross-species-type diseases.”
His TED Talk predicted 30 million deaths
and $10 trillion of economic damage. “It’s
almost strange how close the particular
demonstration I gave was to the real thing,”
he says. His latest book focuses on how to
prevent another fiasco and should be required
reading for every leader. “Few generations live
through events that cause trillions of dollars
of damage and tens of millions of deaths. An
earthquake has never done that, or a fire, yet
we were more geared up for those. We spend
billions of dollars a year on defence but almost
nothing on pandemics.”
Gates has spent hours poring over statistics
from each country’s response to the virus:
“I’m a data man.” Australia, New Zealand
and South Korea responded well at the
beginning. But he has been most impressed
by Vietnam for its health system, messaging
and 98 per cent vaccine coverage. “It’s an
outlier,” he says. He’s a fan of lockdowns but
says countries like Sweden are complicated
because despite having lax rules, the
population behaved responsibly as though
they were locked down, while the US was
stricter but had poor rates of compliance. “And
Hong Kong is a rare example where they did
a brilliant job on lockdowns but that bred a
sense of complacency in vaccinating those
most at risk. They went into Omicron witha 35 per cent vaccination rate of over-sixties,
which is desperate.” Meanwhile Japan is
unique “because of its obsession with mask-
wearing. It has the oldest population but it’s
lucky because they are also thin, and a lot of
death risk relates to obesity and diabetes.”
From the beginning Gates, who
has the world’s best epidemiologists and
pharmaceutical CEOs on speed dial, believed
that a vaccine was the best way to halt
the epidemic and started gearing up for
production. “I thought we’d get them quickly
and we made them cheaply. I give us a B+
for our vaccines; they have been our greatest
weapon. Even [the Chinese vaccine] Sinovac
and the Russian vaccine worked pretty well,”
he says. “Therapeutics have been the greatest
disappointment.”
Gates appears to treat the virus like an
enemy and the pandemic as a war. “I do see
this as a battle and the virus as our adversary.
I’m constantly wondering whether it’s been
smarter than us and how it’s outwitting us.
This should be easier than a war if we are
all sharing knowledge and helping each
other,” he says, “but it’s been more divisive
than I thought.”
In his book he suggests, “Look for the
helpers.” Some people were greedy and self-
obsessed, others altruistic. “In terms of human
nature, we’ve seen that pandemics bring out
the best and worst in people. There will always
be some degree of panic and selfishness,
hoarding, profiteerism, people and countries
who thought they could get the vaccines
first. We vaccinated a lot of young people
in developed countries before old people in
South America and Africa. Now the world
has an oversupply.”
As a technophile who is convinced that
technology can solve every problem, it must
have been difficult watching people often
behave so irrationally and contrary to their
own interests, particularly when he became
the focus of the antivaxers’ ire. When he gave
a talk last month, the protesters came out in
droves. “Fortunately, they got the day wrong
so I missed them. The idea that I would be
singled out as somehow playing a nefarious
role with respect to this pandemic, that I didn’t
predict. Yes, I work in the world of vaccines
and I have a lot of money. But, you know, to
claim that I control people’s bodies is bizarre.”
What does he say to friends who don’t
want to get vaccinated? If you’re not
vaccinated, we don’t want to see you? “Yeah,
that’s going from, ‘I don’t want to see anybody,’
to, ‘I only want to see vaccinated people.’ ”
He won’t call the unvaccinated self-
obsessed, although he finds it hard to
understand why everyone wouldn’t want
to protect themselves.
Gates is also worried that other vaccine
programmes may suffer. “If the weirdness‘IT WAS A GREAT
MARRIAGE. I WOULDN’T
HAVE CHANGED IT. I
WOULDN’T CHOOSE TO
MARRY SOMEONE ELSE’
With Melinda, New York, 2018
The couple with their children, Jennifer, Phoebe and Rory, 2017