Private sector responses to the coronavirus pandemic have shaved “at least six months” off the crisis, according to Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, but he warned governments to avoid relying too much on their reinforcements.
“We certainly need governments when you have an emergency like this,” Gates said Friday during a virtual appearance at the Munich Security Conference. “You don’t want to use just market signals so that the richest citizens or countries get all the capacity.”
Political disputes have arisen within governments and between states throughout the pandemic, intensifying the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China while exposing bureaucratic shortcomings around the world. The success of private companies and organizations in the all-hands-on-deck response to the crisis has raised interest in diplomatic circles in the ways that power resides outside of government halls — particularly with respect to pandemic-related issues.
“We need to make sure that we bring together all those countries [i.e., the United States, the European Union, and China] but also companies that have our scientific expertise and industrial and logistics capacity in order to be able to produce and to implement a global vaccination plan to make sure that the vaccine reaches everybody everywhere,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the forum earlier Friday.
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Gates credited the private sector (which includes charitable organizations such as his own foundation, as well as companies such as Pfizer) with powering the rapid development of vaccines against the contagion over the last year.
“The fact that philanthropies have come in and written checks very quickly that our foundation knows the Indian manufacturers — we’ve helped get up to large capabilities — you know that that was very helpful here,” he said. “It saved at least six months to fund those factories early, but, in general, you shouldn’t rely on that.”
Guterres emphasized the importance of the private sector in distributing vaccines to the developing world.
“The risk is, if we vaccinate only the developed countries, and we let the virus spread in the developing world, the virus will mutate. Mutating will be more dangerous, but also more able to resist vaccines,” he said. “It might come back to haunt the developed world that had sought to protect their people, but then will not be able with the vaccines of the past, to answer with the new variants of the virus.”
Gates echoed that sentiment, touting the value of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, an international organization founded in 2000 to help coordinate vaccine distribution in poor countries.
“If we do this well, we’ll have about a six-to-eight month delta of the vaccination levels of the rich to the developing countries,” he said. “Still longer than we’d like, but I have to say the cooperation of the pharmaceutical companies, the speed with which they innovated, the way that governments are now donating, and how we’re using GAVI, which is so successful, to pull us all together means that we have a chance to get that gap to be only six months.”
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He aired that view shortly before President Biden announced a $2 billion donation to COVAX, one of the GAVI-coordinated initiatives to help poorer countries gain access to vaccines. That’s one of the costs incurred by what Gates implied were government failures in the early days of the pandemic, though he didn’t identify culprits explicitly.
“It is a tragedy that the modest steps that would have been required to contain this epidemic weren’t taken in advance,” he said. “Given the trillions of dollars of damage and the other deficits that are tough to measure, we should make the investment — the small number of billions that we need to ensure ourselves that this never happens again.”
