The problem is the title.
Because this book doesn’t tell us how to “prevent” the next pandemic. It suggests how to deal with the next pandemic. A pandemic that’s assumed by Gates to be on the way, just around the corner. And is going to be be worse than Covid. For sure.
And how to deal with it is more of the same: big government like the CDC and the WH, big multinationals like the WHO, big mandates like stay at home and “mask up” (all randomised evidence aside)… in sum BIG CONTROL. Do what we did with Covid, just faster, harder, wider!
That’s not what experience from Covid taught us. Sweden, which didn’t follow the European lockdown mandates, did as well as other in the EU. Florida (open state) did as well as California (closed state) on Covid and excess deaths and better with its economy and education (didn’t shut schools).
I’ve admired Bill Gates, but lost a lot of respect for him over this pandemic.
Imagine the main reason he gives for masks “working” is ANECDOTAL! (The hairdressers, some masked some not).
Shame on you Bill.
This book is not the book I hoped it might be.
BTW Bill Gates not even *mentioning* the Great Barrington Declaration is just NOT ACCEPTABLE in any serious book about how the pandemic should be handled. Agree with it or not, it was a major contributing to the debate, which was silenced the powers that be, yet turned out to may well have been the best approach. Yet Ignored by Gates.
All in all, shame on Gates for this tawdry book.
To Bill: “yeah, but nah”.
ADDED: *preventing* the next pandemic would mean finding out how Covid started. But Gates is wildly uninterested in finding that out. He blithely dismisses the lab leak theory, even though it’s gaining greater and greater traction. He hardly talks about it. How can you *prevent* something that you don’t know how it originated?
ADDED (ii): Scottish pandemic inquiry shows limited if any impact from mandates — lockdowns. masks, even vaccines.
