Bill Gates Speaks On Coronavirus Vaccines, The Covid-19 Pandemic & Things Getting Back To Normal

You did say that you thought we'd be getting back to normal by the end of 2022. Completely back to normal, I believe, were your words. Do you still think that? Are you still hopeful of that time frame? Yes, I am. You know, there's still some questions about how broadly the J&J vaccine will get used that if that's accepted, you know, would be very beneficial. But, you know, some of the rich countries, including the US and the UK, even this summer, will get to high vaccination levels, and that'll free up so that we're getting vaccines out to the entire world in late 2021 and through 2022. And so we won't have eradicated this disease, but we'll be able to bring it down to very small numbers by the end of 2022. And in terms of that, there's been some speculation that the changing intellectual property rules and allowing these vaccines, as you say, the recipe for these vaccines to be shared would be helpful. And do you think that would be helpful? No. Why not? Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done, moving a vaccine from, say, a J&J factory into a factory in India, it's novel. It's only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all. The thing that's holding things back in this case is not intellectual property. There's not like some idle vaccine factory with regulatory approval that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you've got to do the trials on these things, and every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way. There's all sorts of issues around intellectual property having to do with medicines, but not in terms of how quickly we've been able to ramp up the volume here. You know, I remember how shocked people were when we said we were going to do second sources in these developing country factories. You know, that was a novel thing. We got all the rights from the vaccine companies. They didn't hold it back. They were participating. I do a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs to make sure that work is going at full speed. Here in the UK, we haven't given as many vaccines, I suppose, as you and others would like to the developing world. We're also expecting cuts to the foreign aid spending. What would you like the UK government to do more of to help? Well, the UK government, you know, was great in terms of realizing that vaccines were important, supporting CEPI, supporting Gavi, this Act A thing, which it's the anniversary. The prime minister was key to pulling that together. He's using the G7 meeting. You know, for us, the quicker the UK can get its aid level back up to the 0.7 percent, the better. You know, the needs there are dramatic. UK aid, the voters there should be very proud of the impact that has. It's been the strongest proponent of getting behind vaccines and making sure we eradicate polio. And with the cutbacks, you know, we won't be able to do as much. So I hope that gets restored because it is of critical importance.