In Times of Pandemic, In Gates We Trust

Even as reports of a new viral outbreak in China started popping up during the first weeks of 2020, most people were slow to pay sufficient attention to the developing threat. In contrast, Bill and Melinda Gates acted decisively and quickly. On January 29th, the Gates Foundation pledged $10 million “to help frontline responders in China and Africa accelerate their efforts to contain the global spread.”

Then, less than a week later, the Gates Foundation upped its pledge to $100 million, an exponential increase that reflects the new reality we live in: In the 21st century, it’s not just opportunities and good ideas that spread at warp speed. Massive threats do too. That’s why we have to meet such challenges with massive resources, deployed sooner rather than later. Speed saves.

Bill and Melinda reacted to the emergence of this new coronavirus quicker than most because they recognized it as a threat they’d been studying closely. “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades,” Bill exclaimed in a 2015 TED Talk, “it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.”

With the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015, people got so sick so fast that they were typically bedridden by the time they were contagious. In Bill’s estimation, the world’s response to that threat shows how under-prepared we were for pandemics. But what really concerned him was something more like the Spanish Flu of 1918 than Ebola – i.e., a disease where you might still feel well enough to go to work when you were already contagious. In the modern world, where daily transport levels are roughly 50 times more than they were a century ago, such a disease could have devastating impact.

So when Bill saw certain patterns emerging in China, he knew there was no time to waste.

In the case of our national response to coronavirus, America was hampered by a President who proclaimed that the coronavirus would go away on its own, with little intervention. But even if he’d had more knowledge about the fundamentals of epidemiology, and if he’d shown more competence in directing the resources he had at his disposal, knowledge and competence alone are no longer enough to effectively combat the spread of pandemics. In our globally connected world, a slow response means catastrophic loss. A moderate response means near-catastrophic loss. Extremely fast responsiveness is mission-critical.   

And that’s a key reason why non-profit organizations like the Gates Foundation are indispensable to global health and security now.

For decades, we’ve seen how the Foundation’s combination of non-profit status and substantial resources gives it the capacity to take on long-term, seemingly intractable problems that, for a variety of reasons, the private sector and the public sector alike fail to prioritize.    

But over the last four months, we’ve also seen how a well-resourced, well-run NGO can act quickly in the face of immediate crisis.

The Gates Foundation is large enough that it can effectively intervene on a global level, and yet also nimble enough that it can do so extremely quickly. Its streamlined nature makes it more responsive than most governments. Its emphasis on impact and social good rather than profits means it can act with less concern for potential financial ramifications than even the most service-oriented for-profit companies.

So in the early days and weeks of the pandemic, when our own federal government seemed largely paralyzed or in denial about how to respond to the rapid global spread of the disease, the Gates Foundation continued to escalate its investments.

In every announcement of its efforts, the Foundation emphasized speed. In February, for example, here’s what it said about its second round of funding: “The release of fast and flexible funding is intended to help multilateral organizations and national public health authorities rapidly scale up their virus detection capabilities and implement disease modeling analytics so that they can target resources where they can have the greatest impact in arresting disease spread. This funding is intended to help public health authorities cover the initial cost of labor and supplies while international agencies and national governments appropriate the resources necessary to fund ongoing operations.”

In April, when it announced an additional $150 million commitment, it explained that it would also leverage its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund “to catalyze the rapid procurement of essential medical supplies and help life sciences companies secure financing to produce COVID-19 products.”

In a recent Vox.com article about the Gates Foundation’s coronavirus work, Stanford professor Rob Reich noted how he’s described philanthropy in the past “as a distinctive source of risk capital for long time horizons.”

In this respect, organizations like the Gates Foundation can make investments in early-stage technologies where significant capital is needed, but where the potential for profit – if any at all -- is still very far down the road. In funding the initial research in these cases, well-capitalized non-profits can then help determine if additional funding from governments and for-profit investors is warranted.

But in the new world, their capacity for speed emerges as an equally strong superpower, alongside their patience and their capacity for risk. Consider, for example, how Bill recently explained his vision of building seven factories in parallel in pursuit of a coronavirus vaccine to Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show: “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven just so we don’t waste time in serially saying ‘Okay, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory…It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better. But a few billion in the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars...being lost economically, it is worth it.”

As Vox.com details, The Gates Foundation won’t fund those seven factories entirely by itself. Instead, it’s seeking “a range of national and multilateral stakeholders who are funding the development of vaccines for COVID-19” to partner with on this effort.

That’s because even the world's largest charitable organizations, like The Gates Foundation, cannot match the resources that well-funded governments and the world’s largest for-profit companies can bring to the table. But imagine how long it might take Congress to pass a bill to fund a project where the goal at the start is to produce five billion-dollar factories that won’t actually be used. Imagine a for-profit company trying to rationalize that project to its board or shareholders. While Bill’s plan to build factories in parallel will only come to fruition if governments and for-profits play major roles, the idea might never have even been proposed unless an entity like The Gates Foundation was there to kick-start it with advocacy and funding.

At a time when accelerating innovation is crucial, both to save lives and to help us achieve conditions where it’s genuinely safe to resume more normal levels of economic activity, The Gates Foundation is repeatedly playing the role of catalytic collaborator.

In addition, Bill supported the Seattle Flu Study, which launched in 2019 to learn how the flu and other respiratory illnesses spread through local communities. The team has now expanded its efforts to test for coronavirus as well. In late February, their testing quickly revealed a positive case where the individual in question had no recent travel history, providing the first documented evidence of community spread within the U.S.

In March, the Gates Foundation launched the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator in collaboration with the U.K.-based foundation Wellcome and Mastercard. In less than two months, the Accelerator has granted $20 million to identify and develop potential treatments for COVID-19 through research being conducted by the University of Washington, the University of Oxford, and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.

Bill himself continues to serve as one of our leading public voices during this crisis, by sharing his optimistic but informed perspective on how we should navigate the current moment. In the current atmosphere, as thousands of people die each day and millions grapple with how to pay their bills, all while a highly contentious campaign season is playing out, our need for steady, rational, fact-driven information is paramount. A complex challenge faces us. We need to rapidly improve public healthcare infrastructure and develop effective treatments for Covid-19. At the same time, we have to be mindful of our economy’s health, and take prudent but active measures to improve it where possible.

In this respect, Bill’s track record makes him uniquely suited for this challenge. He’s both one of the most successful CEOs in history, a business leader who pioneered the most economically generative and culturally transformational industry of his era. And, as a second act, he’s become, in partnership with Melinda and their Foundation, a global health leader whose work has helped save more than 122 million lives over the last two decades. We are extremely fortunate to have his expertise and his guidance in this moment.