Bill Gates Warned Against A Pandemic, Now He Thinks He Has A Solution

As the coronavirus pandemic rapidly spread across the United States in March, Bill Gates peppered his longtime friend Jeff Raikes with the science behind testing for the disease during dinner at his home in Medina, Wash.

The two men ate sushi — at an “appropriate” social distance, Raikes said — while Gates detailed the challenges of using nasopharyngeal swabs that reach deep into nasal passages to test for the novel coronavirus. Instead, Gates offered that self-testing with simpler, shorter swabs could be more effective and wouldn’t require health-care workers to risk infection themselves, said Raikes, a former senior leader at Microsoft who went on to run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“He is in his element right now,” said Raikes, who has worked closely with Gates for four decades.

As the virus has spread, killing more than 239,000 people globally, Gates has used his fame and wealth to push for science-based approaches to end the pandemic. Having studied infectious diseases for the past 20 years as part of his philanthropic work, Gates has warned about the potential for a pathogen-spread pandemic since 2015, in a TED Talk, lectures and medical journal articles. Since February, the foundation he runs with his wife has given away $250 million to expand testing for the coronavirus and find a cure for covid-19, the disease it causes.

But the coronavirus is unlike any global health challenge Gates has faced. He’s spent years trying to address health threats vexing the developing world, such as malaria, polio and HIV. Those diseases have either vaccines or therapies, but the countries where they remain a major threat lack health systems to deliver them to people, something the Gates Foundation is trying to fix. When it comes to the coronavirus, though, there is neither a vaccine nor a therapy.