Bill Gates says some world governments have managed the spread of Covid-19 better than others, but the billionaire won’t give any country a perfect mark.
“I wouldn’t say any country got it quite right,” Gates said in a recent interview with the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Sydney, Australia, adding, “Nobody…gets an ‘A’ on this one. “
The Microsoft co-founder and healthcare philanthropist has both praised and criticized the response of multiple governments around the world to the pandemic since the coronavirus first spread in late 2019.
Back in March 2020, Gates argued that the US “didn’t act fast enough” to take extreme quarantine measures, like shutting down businesses and issuing stay-at-home orders. He also said the country’s rollout of effective and accessible Covid testing was too slow.
The US has recorded a higher rate of Covid deaths per capita than any other of the world’s wealthiest nations since the pandemic began.
“Going forward, countries need to have dedicated staff and they need to practice how to connect with the PCR diagnostics industry,” Gates said Monday.
Gates, who published a book last year called How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, said he expects federal governments around the world to make those responses much easier ahead of the next global virus outbreak. Poor Covid responses inspired government spending on future pandemic preparedness in several countries, he noted.
Some Covid responses have been better than others, Gates argued. Citing Australia “and about 7 other countries” he did not publicly name, he noted that Australia’s per capita Covid death rate is still among the lowest in the world. It is currently just 21% of the US coronavirus death rate, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The countries praised by Gates “had early population-scale diagnostics and associated quarantine measures.” [which] has kept infection levels low,” he explained. Gates also hailed Australia’s response to the pandemic over the past year, noting that the country was quick to close its international borders in March 2020.
The US got high marks from Gates in one category: it spent more than $30 billion to fund coronavirus vaccine research and development. The US gave this money to companies in several countries, resulting in several effective Covid vaccines.
Gates’ advocacy of strong pandemic preparedness is not new. In a 2015 TED Talk, he warned that a contagious virus could pose a greater risk to the world’s population than nuclear war.
But on Monday he said he wasn’t entirely surprised by the world’s relatively sluggish response to the spread of Covid: “Pandemics are so rare that it’s easy to be incompetent.”
Pandemic preparedness budgets in the US have been cut repeatedly over the decade to 2020. In Gates’ ideal scenario, that will not happen in the US or anywhere else.
Every five years, governments should have a “really comprehensive exercise at both the national and regional levels” with groups like the World Health Organization to prepare for possible quarantine and diagnostic measures, Gates said.
“Epidemics, hopefully that will make us take them seriously, at least for the next 20 or 30 years,” he added.
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