By Denise Anglesy.
The 58th Munich Security Conference (MSC) was held from February 18 to 20, 2022, at its usual venue in Munich, the Hotel Bayerischer Hof.
Speaking on Friday at the Munich Security Conference, billionaire Bill Gates stated that the omicron variant is a type of vaccine. “It creates both B Cell and T Cell Immunity, and it has done a better job of getting out to the world population than with vaccines.”
He went on: “If you do “sero surveys” in African countries, you get well over 80% of people have been exposed either to the vaccine or to various variants and so what that does is it means the chance of severe disease which is mainly associated with being elderly having obesity and diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure and it’s sad we didn’t do a great job on therapeutics and only here two years in do we have a good therapeutic, vaccines that took us two years to be in oversupply today there are more vaccines than there is 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, which certainly you know, some of the standardised platforms approaches including mRNA would allow us to do that so it took us a lot longer this time than it should have”.
When asked about whether another pandemic could overlap with the current COVID-19 situation Mr Gates responded:
“We will have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time. We will have some rebound. This pathogen, we don’t have a tool to do eradication.
I would like to have a new generation of vaccines that would be suitable. I mean, ideally, we would get rid of families of respiratory viruses, including the flu family and the coronavirus family. I do think that in the next decade, we can come up with an eradication vaccine, that’s an aspiration, not a guarantee, but we should indeed put resources into that. There’s already a lot of work that’s been done on a universal flu vaccine, and the data on that looks very promising.
So we will have rebounds, but they will be more typical seasonal flu levels where of course, we don’t typically shut things down, although, in the future, some degree of mask-wearing will be indicated, but we won’t get death levels at the kind of acute levels we are still experiencing today as the omicron wave passes through on a global basis”.
Mr Gates also stated that “from a medical point of view that this was a rare disease that struck middle income and rich countries dramatically more than low income; usually it’s dramatically the other way”.
Sweden declared the pandemic to be over on February 9, removing most of the restrictions that had been in place and stating that COVID-19 would no longer classify as a danger to society. View the entire session below. The panel also included Ann Linde, Sweden’s foreign affairs minister, who touched on Sweden’s different approaches to COVID-19 and some of the post-pandemic issues facing Sweden.
