He is going to keep on pouring money into efforts to stop the next pandemic until he finally succeeds in making one that kills us all.
Bill Gates is becoming a menace.
He will not leave us alone.
And he’s learned all the wrong lessons from Covid.
At this point he is worse than merely clueless. As one of the world’s 10 richest men and controller of a $50 billion charitable honeypot, Gates has the power to drive public health policy in dangerous directions.
He appears hellbent on doing so.
Gates is obsessed with the risk of future pandemics. Never mind that in the century following the 1918-19 flu pandemic, HIV was the only new infectious disease to cause significant societal disruption.
For all its ferocity, HIV proved controllable with anti-viral drugs that took barely a decade to develop after the virus was found. They would likely be developed much faster today, because scientists have developed far better computer modeling of viral surfaces and the way they interact with our cells.
(You got that right, Bill!)
But Covid.
BUT COVID!
The only problem with pointing to Covid as evidence of a rising threat of naturally emerging infectious diseases… is that it is unclear whether Covid is a naturally emerging infectious disease.
The weight of the evidence suggests otherwise. It suggests, in fact, that nothing is more likely to cause a pandemic than the search for a virus that might cause one.
The virologists who do this work are desperate to distract you from this fact. Thus the nattering about raccoon dogs, despite the fact that THEY HAVE FOUND NO EVIDENCE RACCOON DOGS CARRY A PRECURSOR VIRUS TO SARS-COV-2.
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(Not a conspiracy theory if it’s true)
No matter. Gates wants you to be afraid. And not just of the flu and the ro, which turned out to be a big disappointment to Team Apocalypse, since - as the infamous Sam Harris explained - it didn’t kill enough kids to be properly scary and force everyone to be vaccinated.
No, Gates has other fears:
What if the next pandemic-potential pathogen spreads through surface droplets? Or if it is sexually transmitted like H.I.V.? What if it’s the result of bioterrorism?
Yeah, what if? And what if aliens from Andromeda 6 come up with a fungi that turns us all into walking mushrooms, like the things in The Last of Us, but not as pretty? What then, huh?
Never fear. I mean, once you’re done being terrified, never fear. Gates has the answer. It’s called the Global Health Emergency Corps. They’re like firefighters for a pandemic, you savvy?
(This one’s for the ladeez…)
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Anyhoo, when they’re not fighting pandemics, the Global Health Emergency Corps will be pretending to fight pandemics:
The Emergency Corps plans to run drills to practice for outbreaks. The exercises will make sure that everyone — governments, health care providers, emergency health workers — knows what to do when a potential outbreak emerges.
Gates doesn’t say so, but these drills will have - from his point of view, anyway - the salutary effect of reminding people of the threats of non-existent pandemics, and thus driving funding for more drills. The crypto boys called that a flywheel, until they all went broke.
And how will the Emergency Corps decide how to respond once another souped-up coronavirus leaks out of Wuhan - excuse me, I mean climate change makes bat to cough on a pangolin at a chicken farm orgy and boom, superflu?
You already know the answer to that:
To be successful, the Emergency Corps must build on existing networks of experts and be led by people like the heads of national public health agencies and their leads for epidemic response.
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Which would be nice. Except that Gates seems to have forgotten the key fact of Covid (the second key fact, I mean, the first being that it leaked from a lab):
The key fact of Covid is this: the elites were wrong about everything.
Every.
Thing.
This concept may seem difficult to accept. Everything? Could public health experts - and the governments and billionaires who funded them, and the media outlets that carried water for them - really have been wrong about everything?
Yes, everything.
To take a non-exhaustive list:
They were wrong about masks, lockdowns, school closures, and ventilators. Wrong about how well the mRNA vaccines would work, and what their side effects would be. Wrong about whether kids should even be offered them, given their pathetic effectiveness for children.
Wrong to encourage censorship and stifle debate. Wrong when they predicted Covid would hit the developing world harder than wealthy countries. Most of all, wrong about the risk the coronavirus posed to anyone who was not at death’s door either because of age, other illnesses, or both.
I’m sure they were wrong about other stuff too, but that’s enough.
Look, I could go on, but I’ve got long Covid* (hopes and prayers, people, hopes and prayers!) and really, WHY DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THESE PEOPLE ANYMORE? ESPECIALLY BILL GATES.
Bill Gates made a fortune as a monopolist at Microsoft and a second fortune after he quit Microsoft and Satya Nadellab fixed it for him. Unfortunately, he is too rich and too in love with himself to spend his retirement owning sports teams, and not smart enough to try something truly weird like colonizing Mars.
Instead, he’s surrounded himself with a bunch of people telling him that pandemics are a mortal threat, without bothering to notice that their salaries and careers all depend on convincing him of the mortal threat of pandemics.
It would all be a big joke, except that gain-of-function research (and even the bat expeditions) are actually dangerous.
I don’t know how we stop these people - they have all the money, all the media, and most of the politicians - but we have to try.
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(*I don’t have long Covid. How could I? It doesn’t exist.)
