Bill Gates has been giving interviews here and there to discuss the efforts his foundation has put into battling the Coronavirus, and to hypothesize how long we'll be in this pandemic for. Yesterday, his conversation with Ellen DeGeneres was released, in tandem with an interview he did with BBC Breakfast, which we're highlighting today.
Similar to the conversation with Ellen DeGeneres, Gates echoes the fact that a vaccine is really what we're looking for right now, if we want things to ever go back to "normal." As far as that timeline? He says it will be at least eighteen months.
"People like myself and [Dr. Anthony] Fauci are saying eighteen months," Gates said on BBC Breakfast. "If everything went perfectly, we could do slightly better than that. But there will be a trade-off: We’ll have less safety testing than we typically would have... we just don't have the time to do what we normally do."
As far as creating the vaccine goes, Gates stated how there will be a trade-off when it comes to efficiency versus testing: "If you want to wait and see if a side effect shows up two years later, that takes two years. So when you’re acting quickly... this is a public good, so those trade-offs will be necessary."
"We definitely will look back and wish we had invested more so we could quickly have all the diagnostics, drugs and vaccines," he says.
You can watch his full interview with BBC Breakfast below.
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