EXCERPT:
GATES: "Well, the — sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is a type of vaccine. That is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity. And it's done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines. If you do surveys of African countries, you get well over 80 percent of people have been exposed either to the vaccine or to various variants. What that does is it means the chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure. It's sad, we didn't do a great job on therapeutics. Only here, two years in, do we have a good therapeutic. Vaccines took us two years to be in oversupply. Today there are more vaccines than there's demand for vaccines. And that wasn't true. And next time we should try and make it instead of two years, we should make it more like six months. Certainly, some of the standardized platform approaches, including mRNA, would allow us to do that. It took us a lot longer this time than it should have."