Bill gates1/28/2024 ![]() Our education partners are helping teachers adjust to a world where their laptop is their classroom. We’re helping partners understand COVID-19’s impact on pregnant women and babies and making sure that they continue to receive essential health services. The malaria team has had to rethink how to distribute bed nets in a time when it’s no longer safe to hold an event to give them to a lot of people at once. Our colleagues continue to make progress across all of our program areas. Tackling COVID-19 was an essential part of any global health work in 2020, but it hasn’t been our sole focus over the last year. When our friend Warren Buffett donated the bulk of his fortune to double our foundation’s resources in 2006, he urged us to stay focused on the issues that have always been central to our mission. Our foundation and its partners have pivoted to meet the challenges of COVID-19 in other ways as well. For example, we backed researchers developing new COVID-19 treatments including monoclonal antibodies, and we worked with partners to ensure that these drugs are formulated in a way that’s easy to transport and use in the poorest parts of the world so they benefit people everywhere.Īnd that women who don’t want to get pregnant continue to have access to contraceptives. ![]() Most of that funding has gone toward producing and procuring crucial medical supplies. To date, our foundation has invested $1.75 billion in the fight against COVID-19. And because our foundation is specifically focused on the challenges facing the world’s poorest people, we also understand the importance of ensuring that the world is considering the unique needs of low-income countries, too. Because our foundation has been working on infectious diseases for decades, we have strong, long-standing relationships with the World Health Organization, experts, governments, and the private sector. Philanthropy can help facilitate that cooperation. You need a lot of different people and interests coming together in goodwill to benefit all of humanity. That kind of shared effort is important, because in a global crisis like this one, you don’t want companies making decisions driven by a profit motive or governments acting with the narrow goal of protecting only their own citizens. Many of the parents who took on added caregiving responsibilities when schools closed last March. We are also realistic about what it’s taken to get here: the largest public health effort in the history of the world-one involving policymakers, researchers, healthcare workers, business leaders, grassroots organizers, religious communities, and so many others working together in new ways. When it comes to COVID-19, we are optimistic that the end of the beginning is near. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” “It is not even the beginning of the end. In the fall of 1942, he gave a famous speech marking a military victory that he believed would be a turning point in the war against Nazi Germany. The moment we now find ourselves in calls to mind a quote from Winston Churchill. We believe these new tools will soon begin bending the curve in a big way. Although we have a long recovery in front of us, the world has achieved some significant victories against the virus in the form of new tests, treatments, and vaccines. History will probably remember these last couple of months as the most painful point of the entire pandemic. (And for the epidemiologists reading this, we bet no one is more surprised than you that we now live in a world where your colleague Anthony Fauci has graced the cover of InStyle magazine.) Almost every decision now comes with a new calculus: How do you minimize your risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19? There are probably some epidemiologists reading this letter, but for most people, we’re guessing that the past year has forced you to reorient your lives around an entirely new vocabulary-one that includes terms like “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” and the “R0” of a virus. Over the last year, many of us have experienced that reality ourselves for the first time. Staying alive and well becomes your priority to the necessary detriment of everything else. If your health is compromised-or if you’re worried about catching a deadly disease-it’s hard to concentrate on anything else. Health is the bedrock of any thriving society. Two decades ago, we created a foundation focused on global health because we wanted to use the returns from Microsoft to improve as many lives as possible. We are writing this letter after a year unlike any other in our lifetimes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |