In the next 20 years, Gates believes, progress will be ‘incredible’.
“This is a wonderful time,” he told me, with the most exciting work that the foundation has ever done in the R. & D. pipeline now, waiting to be delivered.
It was almost difficult to keep track of his overview of breakthroughs: about HIV, about tuberculosis, but also on more obscure and neglected diseases such as lymphatic filariasis and visceral leishmaniasis. He predicts that the mother’s figures in the developing world can be brought into rough parity with those in the rich world, and that the deaths in children could be lowered in two.
But in the short term, Gates predicts that child mortality will increase in Trump’s period – and not with a little bit.
Given the various cuts imposed by the Trump government, Gates says that he expects infant mortality to rise by one million extra deaths per year.
He was stunned by the breadth of cutbacks at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and places future deaths in childhood in the hands of Elon Musk.
“The richest man in the world has been involved in the death of the poorest children in the world,” Gates told me, with a rare eruption of real anger about the cuts on USAID “He put it in the wooden chipper because he didn’t go to a party that weekend.”
Those cuts, he says, were much bigger than he expected:
I thought there would be a reduction of 20 percent. Instead, it is now as a cutting of 80 percent. And yes, I didn’t expect that. I don’t think anyone had expected that. Nobody expected the executive power to cut Pepfar or Polio money without the involvement of the congress. What is going on with HIV research and test networks, I did not expect that either.
It is not only America: other leaders of rich countries squeeze their auxiliary budgets.
“Take Keir Starmer,” Gates told me.
A day before he is supposed to fly and see Trump, and he is like, oh, my God, I have to show that we are serious about defense issues. He is in some meetings and says: OK, how do I increase defense expenditure from 2.1 percent to 2.3 percent? And someone says that we can lower the auxiliary budget from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent. Nobody says, hey, what about those children who won’t get vaccines?
Gates calls Ai a ‘magical magic’.
During our conversation he repeatedly returned to the promises of AI – not only in the field of drug discovery, but as part of a better mechanism of delivery, to ensure that those in need actually have access to the world’s most powerful tools.
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