EXCLUSIVE: India's COVID death numbers quite a bit lower than rich countries, says Bill Gates amid row over WHO's 'excess' mortality report

[Surya 1]

EXCLUSIVE: India's COVID death numbers quite a bit lower than rich countries, says Bill Gates amid row over WHO's 'excess' mortality report​

Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said that India did an amazing job, not just in making vaccines but also in getting them out to people.​

Times Now Bureau​

Updated May 6, 2022 | 10:41 PM IST
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Bill Gates, co-chairman, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Photo : Times Now


New Delhi: Amid a raging debate over the World Health Organisation's (WHO) report on 'excess' COVID-19 deaths in India and across the globe, Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, on Friday said that India's death numbers, 'of all the numbers I've seen, are quite a bit lower than the rich countries'.


"I think India's death numbers, of all the numbers I've seen, are quite a bit lower than the rich countries even though there is still some debate over what those numbers are... India's always got a vibrant debate. That's a part of the vibrant democracy. People will eventually come to a consensus on those numbers... I'm pushing hard for a lot of R&D, which India will be a helpful part of, for a new generation of vaccines that have a longer duration and that completely block infection," Gates said in an exclusive interview with Times Now's Editor-in-Chief Rahul Shivshankar.


India did an amazing job: Bill Gates


A day after the WHO report highlighted that India has 4.7 million 'excess' deaths for 2020-21, Gates said that India did an amazing job, not just in making vaccines but also in getting them out to people. "India has better vaccine coverage than the United States," he said.


It may be noted that the Indian government, like many other countries across the world, has refuted the WHO numbers and questioned the methodology of estimating excess COVID-19 deaths.


Gates, who has recently authored a book - How to Prevent the Next Pandemic - noted that the chances of a significantly worse variant of COVID-19 are 'fairly low'. He, however, added that people, especially over 50 years of age, should get booster shots as 'we will have some additional waves in forms of Omicron circulating around the world'.


"We were surprised by Delta, which, of course, hit India very hard. We were surprised by Omicron. So, we can't rule out what might come next. I think the chances of a significantly worse variant are fairly low," Gates said.


The billionaire businessman and philanthropist also noted that the fatality rate of COVID-19 is actually fairly low at about 0.3 per cent. "Small Pox was dramatic, at about 30 per cent. We have to be humble and study this a lot better and have far better tools for the future," he noted.

EXCLUSIVE: India's COVID death numbers quite a bit lower than rich countries, says Bill Gates amid row over WHO's 'excess' mortality report

Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said that India did an amazing job, not just in making vaccines but also in getting them out to people.

www.timesnownews.com

 

[Wiler87]

lol. Imagine that.

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest donor to the World Health Organization.

And even they don't believe WHO numbers.

 

[Azadkashmir]

bill is not happy not enough died from his investment to plz the iblis

 

[Surya 1]

bill is not happy not enough died from his investment to plz the iblis

Bill is no more in investment mode. He has done charity of 90 pc of his fund.

 

[Azadkashmir]

Bill is no more in investment mode. He has done charity of 90 pc of his fund.

#charity on third world - de-population.

 

[Surya 1]

I don't know why your Pakistani friend sir so much interested in bigger dead toll no matter from which source the data comes from. Bill gate was a hero for them we he donated generously to pakistan and got the pakistani civilian award. Soon as he said that Covid death toll in India was lower than developed nation, many Pakistani and Chinese friends started rediculing him.

 

[chinasun]

The Gates Foundation works with Indian vaccine manufacturers to produce COVID-19 vaccine.​

Redirect Notice

Businessmen seldom tell the truth and do everything for their own good.

 

[Surya 1]

The Gates Foundation works with Indian vaccine manufacturers to produce COVID-19 vaccine.​

Redirect Notice

Businessmen seldom tell the truth and do everything for their own good.

Just to correct you, he is social work not business. He has done cherity of 90 pc of his wealth.

 

[chinasun]

Just to correct you, he is social work not business. He has done cherity of 90 pc of his wealth.

Bill Gates is not a philanthropist but a money-making opportunist​

Bill Gates is a renowned name in the world of global influencers.

He grew to global prominence in the technology world and evolved to position himself as a philanthropist.

I have never been in awe of Bill Gates or his foundation – Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In my eyes, he is not a philanthropist but a money-making opportunist.

We as Indians, including our government, can willfully ignore some of the anomalies of the vaccination initiatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in India and other parts of the world, in particular Africa, but it will not change the fact that there is no philanthropy in Gates’s intention. It is only greed.

In an interview, last year, speaking in a documentary: COVID-19: India’s War Against The Virus – premiered on Discovery, this hypocrite Bill Gates, stated, “India’s pharmaceutical industry will be able to produce COVID-19 vaccines not just for the country but also for the entire world.” He further elaborated, “India has a lot of capacity there — with the drug and vaccine companies that are huge suppliers to the entire world. You know, more vaccines are made in India than anywhere.”

He then further goes on to elaborate about India’s vaccine production prowess, saying, “India joined Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which is a group working on a global basis to build vaccines platforms. I am excited that the pharmaceutical industry there will be able to produce not just for India but also for the entire world. This is what we need to reduce the deaths and make sure we are immune, which is how we end the epidemic.”

However in 2021, when India is facing the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, Bill Gates in an interview with Sky News exposes himself to the world by showing that he is not a philanthropist but a vaccine businessman controlling patents.

In the interview with Sky News, Bill Gates was asked if a change in intellectual property law would be helpful in the current Covid crisis?

However, Bill Gates, who fancies himself as saving the world from global annihilation due to COVID, told the interviewer – No. He clearly denied sharing the formulas with developing countries.

Now, one would logically deduce that a quick way to get vaccines to people was to share the vaccine formula and production techniques with countries other than the US so as to enable localized production. But Gates does not think so.

According to Gates, “Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And moving something that had never been done -moving vaccine, say, a from a (Johnson & Johnson) factory into a factory in India — it is novel — it’s only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all.”

The reason behind holding things back in terms of global vaccine rollout expressed by Bill Gates, “It is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trail on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”

A report by Australian Fair Trade & Investment Network Ltd (AFTINET) points out the involvement of Gates through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation towards the partnership of the University of Oxford with AstraZeneca to deliver its Covid-19 vaccine candidate to the countries across the world. The report mentions that this was a major reason for the exclusive license-controlled distribution of the vaccine instead of an open distribution model for any manufacturer.

Here are excerpts of the report that appeared of AFTINET:

“The Nation magazine has started the investigation of investments that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have in the pharmaceutical companies wanting to manufacture possible COVID-19 vaccines. The Gates Foundation is the key funder of Gavi The Vaccine Alliance and CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, as well as being a co-leader in the World Health Organisation’s COVAX Facility and Advanced Market Commitment funds. While this funding is most welcome, it is based on current WTO intellectual property rules that give private companies monopoly rights on new medicines for 20 years, with exceptions that are difficult to use even in a pandemic.

Gates pushed the University of Oxford to deliver its leading COVID-19 vaccine candidate to a partnership with AstraZeneca, as Bloomberg and Kaiser Health News recently reported. This changed the university’s distribution model from an open-license platform, designed to make its vaccine freely available for any manufacturer, to an exclusive license controlled by AstraZeneca.

Gates was persuasive because CEPI funds the University of Oxford’s vaccine projects with US$384 million. The Gates Foundation has also directly given hundreds of millions of dollars to the university through charitable grants for a variety of projects—including previous funding to the university’s Jenner Institute, which is developing Oxford’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Oxford and AstraZeneca have made public promises about forgoing profits and providing fair access to their vaccine if it is successful, but neither have provided details. Other companies have made similar humanitarian pledges but they continue to pursue the traditional business model—based on exclusive licenses— designed to generate profits, not promote fair access.

“If we change the way in which you regulate the industry or the ways in which you want medicines or vaccines to be produced and delivered,” says KM Gopakumar, legal adviser to the Third World Network, who is based in India, “it’s definitely going to affect these companies’ business model—and also the investments of Gates Foundation. So they are using their money to reinforce the status quo.”

The Foundation put US$250 million of its US$2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund into its work on COVID-19, including investments in Gilead, owner of the COVID-19 treatment drug Remdesivir, and CureVac, a German company working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to Forbes’s estimates, Bill Gates’s private wealth, at around US$115 billion, has increased by more than US$10 billion during the pandemic. However, lack of transparency means that there is little information about the details of personal investments in companies working on COVID-19.

If the Gates followed either media or scientific disclosure rules, there would be transparency around the Gates Foundation’s US$47 billion endowments and also the personal fortune of Bill and Melinda Gates.”

As I said, Bill Gates is not a philanthropist but a money-making opportunist. His investments, amounting to millions of Dollars, show that the world’s most talked-about philanthropist, and one of the world’s most influential voices in the pandemic response, is in a position to reap a windfall from the COVID pandemic.

Redirect Notice

Businessmen seldom tell the truth and do everything for their own good.​

 

[hussain0216]

I don't know why your Pakistani friend sir so much interested in bigger dead toll no matter from which source the data comes from. Bill gate was a hero for them we he donated generously to pakistan and got the pakistani civilian award. Soon as he said that Covid death toll in India was lower than developed nation, many Pakistani and Chinese friends started rediculing him.

India was a disaster, you lost millions to your own stupidity

Were interested because we hate you

 

[Surya 1]

India was a disaster, you lost millions to your own stupidity

Were interested because we hate you

Ok. Now find out some news/Twit etc. if that quotes even bigger figure. That will give you more pleasure.