Bill Gates says COVID-19 pandemic not over, advocates health systems strengthening

CO-CHAIR of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore, the need for governments to do more, including strengthening health systems warming that the pandemic is not over.

According to him, there is need to knock mosquito populations down before the foundation could possibly do eliminations in the tougher areas, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nigeria.

Speaking during a virtual Pan-Africa Roundtable Press Conference on his book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic”, Bill Gates noted that the world may have to take a yearly respiratory vaccine that would include both flu and the latest for the coronavirus adding that there’s a big expense of putting that type of yearly vaccination in, including the elderly who are most at risk. He noted that new variants of Covid-19 will come along and how severe they will be is hard to predict.

He said, “We’re still learning about variants and many of these things I talk about, like getting diagnostic machines up broadly, getting the therapeutics out broadly, those things apply to this pandemic, and we should design a system that’ll work not just for this one, but for the future threats as well.

Gates also observed that to stop pandemics, it is important for the global community to give priority attention to diagnostics are way more important. It’s only once the pandemic gets out of control that then you go to vaccines.

He stated that disease-modeling work carried out the Gates Foundation showed that it is going to be hard to get rid of malaria, and that’s partly the reason the foundation advocates for tools like Gene Drive that can reduce Anopheles mosquito populations.

He said, “Our simulation shows we really need to knock, at least for about three years, knock the mosquito populations down before we could possibly do eliminations in the tougher areas, including the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nigeria. The disease modeling work that the Gates Foundation funds, started because of our work in malaria and polio. We wanted to know where we were going to get polio outbreaks, and we wanted to understand what set of interventions would lead to actual successful malaria eradication. A lot of failed efforts at malaria eradication had taken place in the past. And so, we thought only by having really strong models for this would we understand what was necessary”.

By Nkechi Onyedika-Ugoeze, Abuja

https://guardian.ng/features/science/bill-gates-says-covid-19-pandemic-not-over-advocates-health-systems-strengthening/?utm_term=Autofeed&echobox=twitter_post&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1652322634