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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Man Jingles" data-source="post: 4727834" data-attributes="member: 18222"><a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/science/news/bill-gates-predicts-the-next-4-to-6-months-could-be-the-worst-of-the-epidemic/amp_articleshow/79730542.cms" target="_blank">Bill Gates says we will see the worst of the Coronavirus pandemic in the next 6 months. </a>What qualifies this man, who is from an engineering and business background, to speak on matters related to health?Prior to establishing the <a href="https://www.gatesfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation</a>? none whatsoever.But since it was established in 2000, the BMGF has become the largest private philanthropic organization in the world, with an endowment worth some 47 billion dollars. Bill and Melinda Gates themselves have donated some 36 billion dollars from their personal wealth to the foundation.The BMGF invests in projects around the world to enhance healthcare and reduce the impact of health disparities due to extreme poverty. The projects the BMGF has supported include a wide range of health, social, and educational development issues. Importantly, the foundation has also supported scientific research on vaccines for infectious diseases such as malaria, which are primarily endemic in developing countries and for which there is not a lot of financial incentives for the big pharmaceuticals. When it comes to this novel coronavirus, the BMGF has committed some 100 million dollars on projects aimed at improving detection, isolation and treatment efforts; protecting at-risk populations in Africa and South Asia; and accelerating the development of vaccines, drugs and diagnostics.So the thing that qualifies “this man” to speak on matters related to health is that his family has personally invested more in global health than most (maybe any?) other private individuals that have ever lived in the history of the planet.As one of the three trustees of the foundation (Bill and Melinda, Warren Buffet), they have surrounded themselves with plenty of very knowledgeable people in various aspects of public health. They have had to learn a lot about public health because they have skin in the game: they fund projects, they fund research, they have to do due diligence on their investments. In my field of public health (infectious diseases). That alone tells me that Bill and Melinda are not running the foundation as some vanity tax shelter scheme but rather as a proactive philanthropic venture that puts its money where its mouth is.Since then, I’ve heard Bill and Melinda speak on a range of public health issues with a depth of knowledge that tells me that they have learned a thing or two since taking on a greater role with the foundation more than a decade ago.They have both spoken very eloquently on the pandemic because they have experts on speed dial.Hell, why should we listen to politicians with no public health expertise talk on the matter? Anyway, these folks have been at it for a while; they know their stuff.And who can forget Bill’s highly prescient TED talk on the next big outbreak from 2015?“This man” seemed to know a lot about the threat of the next pandemic because it was his role as trustee of the BMGF to know about public health crises likely to be right around the corner. Incidentally, that’s why The Obama administration had left the White House a pandemic preparedness plan.Oh, and before I forget, you know the Moderna vaccine that is on the verge of being shipped around the globe to help halt the pandemic? the BMGF funded Moderna Therapeutics with a grant of 20 million dollars back in 2016.I guess that’s why Bill Gates created the virus so that vaccines could implant microchips in our bodies, or whatever the hell conspiracy theorists are saying.Yep. These men and women knew a lot about public health issues. Hence, I think they are more than qualified to speak on the matter.They were qualified years ago.</blockquote>

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