- But I appreciate you, like I said,
taking the time to sit
down and chat with me
and share your perspective
and your knowledge with my audience.
I think what you have to say
is gonna be really helpful
for the type of people
that watch my content.
(upbeat, fun music)
Today I am doing something
very different for my channel,
but very exciting.
I'm about to interview the Bill Gates.
Yes, like the Bill Gates
who started Microsoft,
but that is not what I'm
gonna be talking about
with him today.
Aside from Microsoft, Bill
and his wife, Melinda,
contribute greatly to society
through their philanthropic endeavors,
with the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation.
I've actually worked with them already
on this video right here,
so make sure to check that
out, if you haven't already.
In 2020, we've been
facing a global pandemic,
and with that has come a lot of
misinformation, myths, and conspiracies.
Bill Gates himself has
even been the target
of a COVID-19 conspiracy
here on the internet,
and as much as I love to
fall down the rabbit hole
of a conspiracy theory or two,
it's just for entertainment value.
When we take these conspiracies as fact,
they go too far.
It is more important than ever
that we access accurate information,
so we can all help work together
to put the world back
together in working order.
And that's what I'm going to be discussing
with Bill Gates today,
so I'm gonna go finish getting ready,
and I'll be back with Bill.
So, first off, I wanna ask you, you know,
we're seeing a lot of
conflicting information
being shared about the coronavirus,
even amongst professionals.
There is a ton of myths,
misconceptions, conspiracies
flying around on the internet,
so what is the harmful
effects or the implications,
of all of this
misinformation being spread?
- Yeah, unfortunately,
if we don't communicate well
and have trusted people
bearing the message,
then the willingness to wear masks,
the willingness to quarantine,
and eventually, when we do have a vaccine,
the willingness of enough
people to be willing to take it,
so we protect everyone and
bring this pandemic to an end,
that's definitely at risk.
And you know,
the very titillating conspiracy ideas
do get a lot of clicks,
whereas the, you know,
the truth often,
just isn't as simple and
therefore not as exciting.
So, you know, we're fighting,
this is our first big
pandemic for a long time,
you know, we're trying
to get knowledge out.
We have to admit, there's a
lot the experts didn't know.
For example, at the beginning,
we didn't know about masks,
and we didn't advise people,
and then we had to change that
and admit, whoops, this is
actually not only important,
it's like super important
that we wear these masks.
- Right, so speaking of masks,
there's been a lot of myths about masks,
like it increases how much carbon dioxide
that you're breathing in,
or that you don't have
to socially distance
if you're wearing one.
So what can you share to help
bust some of those myths?
- Well, you know, society has rules about,
you know, wearing clothes and now,
you know, at least briefly,
there's one item that
we're asking people to add
that is not have significant
negative effects at all.
And you know, if you're
outside of your household,
where you might come near to anyone,
wearing that mask is
helping not only yourself,
but other people,
because we know now
that there's lots of people
who are asymptomatic.
In fact, the younger you are,
the more likely it is that
you may have the virus
and transmit it without
ever getting symptoms,
and yet that eventually
will get out to the people
who have the comorbidities
or the elderly people
who are at great risk of being very sick
or dying from this.
So, it's kind of amazing
that such a cheap, doable
intervention has this big effect.
Some of the Asian countries, like Japan,
have adopted it
because they have a history
of using it during flu season.
The US it's pretty new,
and the compliance has not
been as strong as we needed.
- And you also mentioned vaccines,
and I know you've done a lot
of work in the vaccine space.
And another theory that
kind of circulates is
that vaccines have harmful
effects for the human body.
So can you tell us,
is there any concern when getting vaccines
that you could get an illness
or have any kind of
long-term side effects?
- Well, the US is the
best country in the world
at having a safety regulator, the FDA,
that takes all the vaccines, the drugs,
medical interventions,
and goes through quite a rigorous process
to make sure that the safety is very high
and the benefits are extremely strong,
and so that's what we're going through.
We, that's what happens with vaccines.
You know, the rumors about vaccines
causing various problems like autism,
all of those has been investigated,
like as much as anything ever,
and, you know, shown that
there isn't that connection.
No medicine is perfect, but
the benefit of the vaccine,
if it goes through those
trials and get approved,
is that it will stop
these deaths, you know,
which are still in the
globe, very, very large,
even in the US, you know, now typically
over 1,000 people a day are
dying, so pretty horrific.
And I wish there was another
way to bring this to an end,
but the vaccine will be the first time
we can even think about
going back to normal.
- So what do we currently know
about a vaccine for Coronavirus?
How close are we to getting one?
You know, how is it going to
positively help the situation?
- Well, the US in particular,
and our foundation,
have funded these companies
to come up with a new vaccine,
because we'd never seen this
form of Coronavirus before,
that's novel, but we're
able to use some platforms,
some existing approaches, that
have worked with vaccines.
So the six companies that
will be in the final trials,
which are called phase three trials,
by the end of September,
they use four different
approaches between them.
We're trying to make sure that
not only is the vaccine safe,
but it blocks you from
transmitting to someone else,
and it prevents you from getting sick.
And particularly, in elderly
people to have a vaccine work
'cause their immune systems
aren't as strong as young people.
We do have vaccines like the flu
that don't work very well in old people.
We have to do better with this vaccine
because that's so much
of the group, you know,
over 95% of the people
who are at risk of death
are elderly people here.
So we're, you know, building
factories for these vaccines,
the various safety
regulators around the world,
but most importantly, the FDA,
is reviewing how these trials work.
You know, they'll look very carefully at
whatever goes on during those trials.
These are big trials,
it's 30,000 people in
each of these trials,
so that means 15,000 who actually get,
who don't get the vaccine,
they get something stuck in their arm
so that they're not quite
sure, but it's a placebo,
and the other 15,000 get the vaccine.
And then we wait and we see, okay,
are the infections very
strongly in the placebo arm
and hardly at all in the vaccinated arm,
so that we should give it an approval
to get out to the population.
- Given we don't currently
have something like a vaccine
or any known treatment for this right now,
and we're heading into fall,
it's back-to-school season.
What should parents, teachers,
students be thinking about
when considering physically
going back to school or not?
- Yeah, that's a very important issue
because kids going to
school is so important,
you know, for their learning
to socialize, what they learn,
freeing up their parents to
be able to do their work.
You know, it's very unnatural
to be in this situation
that we find ourselves in,
and yet we don't want the schools
to be a source of transmission,
particularly up into the elderly.
So the idea of, can you get
younger teachers in there?
Can you, you know, make sure it's teachers
who when they go home,
don't have a multi-generational household,
so again, they're not
that not transmitting.
It's all come at kind of the last minute.
You know, people were hoping this summer
the numbers would go down,
and so the fall it would
be straight forward
to open most schools.
As it is for the fall,
it looks like most public schools
will not open in the United States.
You know, ideally, as we
get the case numbers down,
using therapeutics and everything,
and we figure out these protocols,
we can get, particularly the young kids,
particularly in the inner
city, back into those schools.
But you know, there's no black and white,
yes, they should all go back,
or no, none of them should go back.
It's with the right safeguards,
a lot of these kids,
we should find a way to
get them back into school.
For the elderly kids, we'll wait longer,
online learning tends
to work better there.
We may need to, you know, get
the vaccine actually in use
before we can get all of
education back to normal.
- Yeah, absolutely.
So, as young people, in particular,
what can we do to help
not only stop the spread,
but to help stop the
spread of misinformation
and make sure that our friends, our family
are receiving accurate information.
- Well, everyone participates
in social media, you know,
trying to promote the corrective
fact-checking elements
of this in terms of, you know,
why is the vaccine being
created, and, you know,
what is it about masks.
You know, everybody gets to contribute
to trying to get the facts out there.
You know, likewise all of us
should be paying attention
to the safety trials and, you
know, hope that they go well,
so we get that tool.
You know, the patience required,
you know, the economic
damage here, and, you know,
some of the mental health effects
of having our lives disrupted,
particularly, you know,
unfortunately in low income communities,
even more than the population at large,
because they often have
the jobs that require you
to show up and be there
and therefore be exposed.
The inequities have been
really reinforced here,
and everything we do to
help with this pandemic
is a push for equity in our society,
which of course is our dream as Americans.
But with things like George Floyd,
we've seen how far we are from
completely achieving that.
Even this disease is striking minority
and low income households way more
than the average household,
so that, you know,
is a huge tragedy.
You know, I'm not trying
to be negative here,
I do think that the therapeutics
will cut the death rate.
We will get a safe vaccine and, in the US,
sometime next year, by
the end of the year,
if we can all work together,
you know, spread the truth,
we will get out of this and
get back to where we were
before it all started.
Obviously we'll be digging our way out,
economically, educationally
for a long time,
but we'll be able to not having
the pandemic hold us back.
- Is there a good resource
or a place that you can point us to,
to find the most accurate
up-to-date information?
- Well, certainly the CDC website
is probably the most
authoritative and, you know,
they're gathering the data
from around the country.
There are, you know,
the John Hopkins Coronavirus
site has the global data
that you can look at that
map and see, you know,
where things are better and worse,
that's always helpful to me.
And I have to say,
the media is doing a very
good job covering the topic.
You know, hopefully the media
that various people trust
are doing well at getting the truth out.
You know, credible
media sources are better
than just rumor mill type sources
in terms of what's getting out there,
so hopefully we can amplify
that side of the discourse.
- And can you share for people,
'cause I do think that another kind
of misconception out there
still circulating from
the very beginning of this
is that it's similar to
just the standard flu
that we see every year,
so can you help share why that's different
from the standard flu
and also what the long-term
effects of it are?
- Well, sadly,
this disease causes a lot
more problems than the flu,
and, you know, we've been surprised
at how much it causes blood
clots and affects the brain.
It's not just the lungs,
which is where all the fluid damage is.
This does damage the lung, but
it damages many other things,
and some people have
very long-term effects,
even people who survive.
And so it's a nastier bug than the flu.
Also, of course, we have
no prior exposure to this,
whereas with the flu, even
though it changes somewhat,
it's got enough similarity
that the prior immunity
protects a lot of people
from serious disease.
Again, with the flu,
we also have a vaccine.
It's not a perfect vaccine,
in that it mostly protects
young people, but you know,
it's good, and, you know,
getting higher compliance
with that vaccine will help.
You know, the death rate
from flu is nontrivial,
it, on average, is about 60,000 a year.
This is much, much higher than that.
You know, we don't know
in the US, you know,
will we get to 250,000, 300,000?
Then that's despite all these
amazing things we've done
in terms of staying at
home and wearing masks,
and, you know, taking the economic damage
to avoid the health, which, you know,
if people literally
had ignored this thing,
not like they would have,
but you would have had millions
of deaths in that case.
And so, it's, you know,
it's in a different league than flu
without the behavior change
that has held it in check somewhat.
- Well, I appreciate
all of this information
that you shared,
I think it's gonna be really
helpful for my viewers.
This is the kind of
information that we need,
so I appreciate you taking the time
to share your knowledge and
information with all of us
and answering these questions for me.
So, yeah, hopefully,
hopefully next time we sit down to chat,
it won't have to be socially distanced,
and we'll be able to
get together in person
and not through Zoom much easier.
But until then, everybody needs
to keep wearing their masks,
sanitizing their hands,
staying up to date with
accurate information
at the places, the
resources that you shared,
and we all just have to keep hoping
that the vaccine comes
sooner rather than later.
- Thank you, it was
great talking with you.
- Wow, that was crazy, I
just talked to Bill Gates.
I called him Bill, so cool (laughs).
Okay, I hope you guys enjoyed this video
and found some helpful information.
I know that I even feel
like I learned quite a lot
from that discussion,
so I hope you guys did too
and found it interesting.
I'm gonna link some of the resources
that Bill Gates mentioned to
down below in description box,
as well as the video I've
done with them in the past.
Actually, you know what?
Click right up here to watch that video
and click up here to watch
another one of my videos.
I will see you guys next time.
Stay safe.
