Tag Archives: Bill Gates

We’re now in the earliest stage of the Age of AI: Bill Gates warns of its potential to undermine elections and democracy

Revelations 13:14 “…by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast it deceives those who dwell on earth…”

Important Takeaways:

  • Microsoft founder Bill Gates has made it clear: AI is poised to change the world as we know it, and we need to start readying ourselves for that not-so-distant future.
  • “Soon after the first automobiles were on the road, there was the first car crash,” the billionaire wrote in a Tuesday post on his personal blog. “But we didn’t ban cars,” he added, arguing that we instead began to enforce “rules of the road.”
  • “We’re now in the earliest stage of another profound change, the Age of AI,” he continued. “It’s analogous to those uncertain times before speed limits and seat belts.”
  • Gates then went on to list a number of legitimate AI concerns that underscore the growing need for AI rules and regulations. At the top of Bill’s Bad List, notably, was the threat that AI poses to democratic election meddling and misinformation.
  • “Deepfakes and misinformation generated by AI could undermine elections and democracy,” Gates wrote. “On a bigger scale, AI-generated deepfakes could be used to try to tilt an election. Of course, it doesn’t take sophisticated technology to sow doubt about the legitimate winner of an election, but AI will make it easier.”

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Bill Gates supports decision to give WHO authority over our Health Care in case of future pandemic

Bill Gates

William Penn – “If we are not governed by God, then we will be Governed by a tyrant”

Important Takeaways:

  • Bill Gates Calls for Sovereign Nations to Surrender Health Authority to WHO
  • Gates argues that the WHO should be viewed as a “fire department for pandemics” that seizes control of nations on a global level during health emergencies.
  • Speaking in a New York Times op-ed published Sunday, Gates voiced his support for the WHO’s Global Pandemic Treaty.
  • The WHO’s treaty will essentially establish an unelected global regime that will override local laws with global protocols if the United Nations agency declares a health emergency.
  • The organization argues that a single governing body is essential for handling future pandemics.
  • All 194 of the WHO member nations are set to vote on the amendments and finalize the new treaty by May 2024.
  • Democrat President Joe Biden has already confirmed that he plans to approve and sign the amendments and is pushing to do so without congressional approval.

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Bill Gates concerned that polarization in the U.S. could end it all, but won’t get involved?

2 Peter 3:3-4 says, “In the last days mockers will come with their mocking, following after their own lusts, and saying, ‘Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation.’”

Important Takeaways:

  • Bill Gates Makes Concerning Statement about the Election and Civil War
  • Gates is still worried about domestic polarization in the U.S., which he sees little hope for in the short-term. “I admit that political polarization may bring it all to an end, we’re going to have a hung election and a civil war,” he said. “I have no expertise in that, I’m not going to divert my money to that because I wouldn’t know how to spend it.”
  • Instead of saying he would do something to try to alleviate that polarization which he thinks might bring everything to an end, he says he’s not going to put his money into “that,” like it’s an investment opportunity that he doesn’t want to get involved in. If you thought that everything was about to end, would that be the way you would respond?

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U.N. chief: time for national plans to help fund global COVID-19 vaccine effort

By Michelle Nichols and Stephanie Nebehay

NEW YORK/GENEVA (Reuters) – U.N. chief Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday it is time for countries to start using money from their national COVID-19 response to help fund a global vaccine plan as the World Bank warned that “broad, rapid and affordable access” to those doses will be at the core of a resilient global economic recovery.

The Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator and its COVAX facility – led by the World Health Organization and GAVI vaccine alliance – has received $3 billion, but needs another $35 billion. It aims to deliver 2 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021, 245 million treatments and 500 million tests.

At a high-level virtual U.N. event on the program, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the financing gap was less than 1% of what the world’s 20 largest economies (G20) had committed to domestic stimulus packages and “it’s roughly equivalent to what the world spends on cigarettes every two weeks.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged $100 million to GAVI to help poorer countries gain access to a vaccine and Johnson & Johnson Chief Executive Alex Gorsky committed 500 million vaccine doses for low-income countries with delivery starting in mid-2021.

“Having access to lifesaving COVID diagnostics, therapeutics or vaccines … shouldn’t depend on where you live, whether you’re rich or poor,” said Gorsky, adding that while Johnson & Johnson is “acting at an unprecedented scale and speed, but we are not for a minute cutting corners on safety.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has said that a vaccine against the virus might be ready before the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election, raising questions about whether political pressure might result in the deployment of a vaccine before it is safe.

“We remain 100 percent committed to high ethical and scientific principles,” Gorsky said.

GAVI Chief Executive Seth Berkley said that so far 168 countries, including 76 self-financing states, have joined the COVAX global vaccines facility. Tedros said this represented 70% of the world’s population, adding: “The list is growing every day.”

China, Russia and the United States have not joined the facility, although WHO officials have said they are still holding talks with China about signing up. The United States has reached its own deals with vaccine developers.

‘LONG HAUL’

World Bank President David Malpass said the pandemic could push 150 million people into extreme poverty by 2021 and the “negative impact on human capital will be deep and may last decades.”

“Broad, rapid and affordable access to COVID vaccines will be at the core of a resilient global economic recovery that lifts everyone,” he said.

Guterres said that the ACT-Accelerator was the only safe and certain way to reopen the global economy quickly.

But he warned that the program needed an immediate injection of $15 billion to “avoid losing the window of opportunity” for advance purchase and production, to build stocks in parallel with licensing, boost research, and help countries prepare.

“We cannot allow a lag in access to further widen already vast inequalities,” Guterres said.

“But let’s be clear: We will not get there with donors simply allocating resources only from the Official Development Assistance budget,” he said. “It is time for countries to draw funding from their own response and recovery programs.”

U.N. Secretary-General Guterres called on all countries to step up significantly in the next three months.

Billionaire Bill Gates told the U.N. event that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had signed an agreement with 16 pharmaceutical companies on Wednesday.

“In this agreement the companies commit to, among other things, scaling up manufacturing, at an unprecedented speed, and making sure that approved vaccines reach broad distribution as early as possible,” Gates said.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab – a co-host of the meeting along with Guterres, the WHO and South Africa – urged other countries to join the global effort, saying the ACT-Accelerator is the best hope of bringing the pandemic under control.

Said Merkel: “We’re in for the long haul and we need more support.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols and Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Paul Simao and Jonathan Oatis)

Presidents, billionaires battle World’s deadliest creature

Workers look for holes in mosquito netting at the A to Z Textile Mills factory producing insecticide-treated bednets in Arusha, Tanzania

By Katy Migiro

ARUSHA, Tanzania (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Jakaya Kikwete, the former president of Tanzania, recalled arriving at his cousin’s house to find the family arguing about taking their feverish teenage daughter to hospital.

“They were saying: ‘No, no, no, it’s not malaria’,” he said, describing how the family had sought advice from a traditional medicine man who said a jinni, or spirit, had invaded her body.

“They said: ‘If you take this girl to the hospital, if she gets an injection, then that jinni (spirit)… will… suck all her blood’,” Kikwete said.

Ignoring their protests, he took the girl to hospital but it was too late. She died from malaria.

Kikwete, who also lost his brother to malaria as a child, is committed to eradicating the disease, which killed an estimated 438,000 people globally in 2015 – making the mosquito, which transmits it, the world’s deadliest creature.

He and his wife even appear in television adverts, urging Tanzanians to prepare their bednets before they sleep.

“We are looking at 2040 as the most probable date for a malaria-free Africa,” Kikwete, who stepped down as president in November, told reporters at a recent dinner in Dar es Salaam.

“If we continue with the interventions that we have been doing here relentlessly, we should be able to get there.”

THE “E-WORD”

Global plans to eliminate malaria were abandoned in 1969 as the goal was seen as prohibitively complicated and expensive, despite success in eradicating the disease in the 1950s in parts of Europe, North America and the Caribbean.

The “e-word” has been revived in recent years, with support from the world’s richest couple Bill and Melinda Gates and U.S. President Barack Obama, who called malaria a “moral outrage”.

Bill Gates, who Kikwete describes as a “good friend”, aims to eradicate malaria by 2040 and has called for a doubling of funding by 2025.

His goal of permanently ending transmission of the disease between humans and mosquitoes is more ambitious than the Sustainable Development Goal of ending epidemic levels of malaria by 2030.

Spending on malaria, mostly by the United States, surged to $2.7 billion in 2015 from $130 million in 2000, while death rates in Africa have fallen by 66 per cent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The most important investment was the roll out of one billion free bednets. Some 68 percent of malaria cases prevented since 2000 were stopped by these bednets, according to a study by the University of Oxford.

Money was also poured into improved diagnostic tests, better drugs, indoor spraying with insecticide and educating the public to use these tools – rather than blaming witchcraft or buying medication blindly over the counter every time they got a fever.

EVERYTHING IS FREE

In the Tanzanian town of Arusha, overlooked by the dormant volcano Mount Meru, donor-funded bednets and free tests and medicines have made a significant impact.

In a country with a powerful faith in witchcraft and traditional medicine, health officials have worked hard to persuade people to adopt proven methods of preventing and treating the disease.

“There are very few cases of malaria nowadays,” said Pius Dallos, the officer in charge of Kijenge Dispensary, where women sat on wooden benches, cradling their babies.

“Previously… if you didn’t have money, you could die from malaria. But nowadays, everything is free.”

But donors’ ability to maintain – and increase – funding is by no means certain given sluggish global growth and uncertainties over U.S. funding under a new administration.

“The political will to go that final mile may be hard to sustain because it will remain expensive until the end,” Dyann Wirth, a tropical disease expert at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It’s a question of priority.”

It is unlikely that Africa, which accounted for nine out of 10 of the 214 million cases of malaria in 2015, according to the WHO, could foot the bill itself.

On the edge of Arusha, Africa’s largest bednet manufacturer, A to Z Textile Mills, has been the main source of 50 million free bednets given to Tanzanians between 2009 to 2016.

Giant, noisy warehouses produce insecticide-treated fibres which are woven into round and square blue bednets. Women in green T-shirts work in fast-moving pairs, folding and cutting panels ready for stitching.

Donor funding drives production of the much-needed nets, as many ordinary Tanzanians cannot afford them.

“Demand is not driven by the need (but) by the funding,” said factory director Kalpesh Shah, sitting in front of framed photographs of visits by celebrity campaigners like Bono and Will Smith on the boardroom wall.

Commercial customers account for less than one percent of sales, he said. The Gates-funded Global Fund To Fight HIV, Tuberculosis and Malaria is their main buyer, followed by the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative.

“The question of sustainability is on everyone’s mind,” said Daniel Moore, acting mission director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Tanzania.

“Right now, we are carrying the load.”

RISK

The failure of the global eradication programme that began in the 1950s casts a shadow over the latest campaign.

As mosquitoes and parasites developed resistance to insecticides and drugs in the 1960s, malaria rebounded in countries like Sri Lanka where once it had been virtually eliminated.

Resistance is becoming a major problem again. But greater efforts are being made to invest in new products that will keep humans one step ahead of evolution.

New tools are also required to eliminate the parasite from ‘asymptomatic carriers’ – people with a few parasites in their blood who don’t fall sick but can act as reservoir and spread the disease when they get bitten again by mosquitoes.

As the number of malaria cases falls, it will become harder to maintain the momentum among donors, governments and ordinary people in endemic regions.

“Without the long term investment of funds and the political commitment to continue the fight, we risk wasting the entire investment,” said Wirth.

“We are going to go back to the situation where we are losing one million children a year in Africa.”

The International Center for Journalists and Malaria No More provided a travel grant for this report

(Reporting by Katy Migiro; Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org to see more stories.)