For the same medications as the vet, but up to 30 percent less with fast free shipping. Visit petmeds. Com today. This is gps, the Global Public square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world, im fareed zakaria. Today on the show, bill gates, the head of the Worlds Largest charitable foundation. What do we now know about the strange virus and its effects. Has the lockdown worked . Is america ready to open up for business again . Will we have a vaccine and when . I will ask bill gates these questions and more. Also, where in the world did the virus come from . Was it from a wet market or a chinese lab . Will we ever know . We will get the latest science from one of the worlds foremost virus detectives. Finally in this earth week, ill tell you about the Silver Linings in the covid crisis for mother earth. First, heres my take. Poor brian kemp, he obviously didnt get the memo. When the governor on georgia announced on monday that he would begin opening up his states economy, he must have assumed President Trump would lavish him with praise. Just days earlier the president said publicly the country was starting our life again and indicated some states were ready to open up. On wednesday, trump tweeted states are safely coming back. Our country is starting to open for business again. And yet, hours after that tweet, at his daily press conference, the president announced that he disagreed strongly with kemps decision. Welcome to Donald Trumps reelection strategy, where he is both the government and the fiery opposition to that government. Populism has always fundamentally been a protest movement of outsiders railing against a corrupt elite that runs the country. Right wing populism makes a distinction between the real people and the others who tend to be foreigners, immigrants, blacks, jews and other minorities. This strategy works well out of government. One youre inside, you face a challenge. Politicians who win elections usually try to broaden their base and unify the nation. But populism depends on division and dissatisfaction. In addition in times of genuine emergency, people sober up. Across the world, many populist parties that frivolously attack the establishment have struggled to make their voices heard. In a pandemic, it turns out many people want their governments to take an active stance, preferably based on advice from experts. Trumps solution is to play insider and outsider simultaneously. One day he announces a careful plan devised by Public Health officials that is a step by step opening up, the next day he sides with street protesters against governors who are following those very guidelines. Its a complicated dance. You can watch the two trumps at his press conferences. He begins the session as President Trump making the days official pronouncements, reading in a dreary monotone from a script he doesnt appear to have looked at before. And then from time to time, donald trump, the populist icon, suddenly pops up. Commenting on his own script. For example, to say after recommending the use of masks this is voluntary. I dont think im going to be doing it. The dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde routine continues throughout the briefing as his own Health Officials take the podium to make a substantive point, trump will jump in to Say Something that is at odds with the message theyre trying to convey. Trump is worrying this dance may not be enough to win him reelection. The president has surely noticed his Approval Ratings remain roughly where they were before the pandemic which is astonishing given that crises usually boost president ial approval enormously. So he has doubled down on the attack strategy against the usual scapegoats, the media and what has become an absurd daily routine as well as blue state governors, liberal cities, international organizations, and now, of course, most pointedly china. Hes also returning to his favorite target, immigrants. The president s ban on immigrants seeking green cards from coming into the country for 60 days is strange since the u. S. Has already largely halted immigration. But its not really a policy, it is a political symbol. A reminder to trumps base that they can always count on him. There is, of course, another path. Donald trump could have used the crisis to rally the nation around a common foe. He could have provided calm, sensible leadership, stayed on message with his own Health Officials, and fostered unity rather than division. Thats the approach of german chancellor, angela merkel, who now has a 79 approval rating. Its the strategy of Emmanuel Macron who has moved up ten points in his very polarized country. It turns out President Trump only knows one dance, call it the populism hustle. And he seems uninterested in learning any other. For more, go to cnn. Com fareed and read my Washington Post column this week. And lets get started. Lets get right to the main event. Bill gates barely needs any introduction. I will simply remind you hes one of the worlds richest people and has dedicated a large share of his fortune and expertise to fighting diseases. Hes now taken a lead role in the search for a vaccine and a cure for the coronavirus, the bill and Melinda Gates foundation is funding factories for each of the seven most promising ideas for a vaccine, even though gates freely admits that only one or two of them will actually be used. Im now joined by bill gates. Pleasure to have you on, bill. Good to see you. So, if you were to explain to people in general, would you tell them that we now know the coronavirus is more deadly, less deadly, more transmissible, less transmissible . How do you characterize this one . Well, we know that if we do these extreme social isolation measures we get the reproductive rate below 1, which means the total number of active infections starts to go down. What we dont know is we go slightly back to normal which activities create the risk of a rebound. And so we need to put into place a very dense testing regime so you would detect that rebound going back into the exponential growth very quickly and not wait for the icus to fill up and there to be lots of deaths. If you see the hot spot, you kind of understand the activities causing that. Change policy there and get it back down to the into the decline. So that the the brute force tactic that was used did work it worked in every country, but thats cost such damage we want to back off from that and were a little naive about how to prioritize those activities. We need the testing, we need strong leadership where the Scientific Community and the politicians are saying, okay, whats the value . Things like school obviously have a high value, if we can figure out a format thats not driving a lot of infection. So, you talk about testing. Everybody talks about it. And it seems bizarre, you know, just from the outside that it would be so hard. This is the richest country in the world. You know, people have made analogies to wars during world war ii, the United States went from a standing start of zero planes to being able to produce a plane every 63 minutes in one of the ford factories. Why cant testing be ramped up to the million a day level that a lot of People Experts believe would be necessary to help reopen . Yeah. So it looks like with new machines and using them in a better way well be able to get up to 400,000, 500,000 a day, thats just barely enough for really doing the tracking. Theres some very innovative ways of running those machines or eventually getting the strip test that could take us to higher numbers. The key thing about the u. S. , though, this focus on the number of tests understates the cacophony and the mistakes we made in the testing system. The access to that testing system is very unequal. The wrong people are being tested and any time you dont get results in less than 24 hours, the value of the test is dramatically reduced. So, the u. S. Is unique in terms of just, you know, who you know, whether you get in front of the line, asymptomatics can get in front of the line and you get these lines that that are way too long. Let me ask you about the vaccine that youve been so involved in. So i talk to experts, theres a range of views. One of which is, look, we may not get a vaccine. Dont have vaccines against some other coronaviruses. There are some viruses for which you dont get one. On the other side people tell me with so many efforts being made like yours, the government is also doing one, the British Government is doing one, the chinese are undoubtedly doing one, we will actually end up with a vaccine much faster than people are predicting. Well, its very hard to compress these timeframes. If everything went perfectly we would be in scale manufacturing within a year. We may not achieve that. It could be as long as two years. Theres over 100 efforts. What we need to do is pick the most promising of those, get money, sort of go full speed, build the manufacturing in parallel, system of which is shared like the fillfinish, the last step, where theres nowhere need the capacity for the 7 billion doses. But are you optimistic it will be on the shorter end . I heard people say in september we could start production. No. I dont moderna you have to do these phase three studies that help you understand if somebody has condition x, y, or z, does it create a side effect. Theres people with defective immune systems, all sorts of things. So the size of the phase three, the Global Regulators have to get together and decide how many people, what length of time that goes in. And youll have to trial with a very heavy infection rate. So the idea the idea of being in manufacture in the last year, thats beyond my whats likely. Dr. Fauci and i have been fairly consistent in saying 18 months to create expectations that are not too high. This influences, short of a miracle set of therapeutics, this influences when we get to go back to true normal. Next on gps, bill gates on when and how the economy will come back. Blatche i feel cared about as a member. Were getting a super competitive Interest Rate on our money. Were able to invest through the same exact platform. I really liked that they didnt have any hidden or extra fees. Sofi has brought me peace of mind. Truly thank you for helping me prepare for whatever the future has in store. The calming scent of lavender by downy infusions calm. Laundry isnt done until its done with downy. A book that youre ready to share with the world . Get published now, call for your free publisher kit today we are back now with bill gates whose foundation has already committed more than a quarter billion dollars to fighting covid19. Let me ask you about the economy. When trying to open up, one of the challenges is some states are opening up earlier than others. Some countries are opening up earlier. Can we be sure that we know what exactly the right levels are and how to open up . I ask this because there are a lot of governors, for example, who are criticizing the predictions that were made. The Florida Governor says, look, there were all these models that predicted to us that we would need 200,000, 300,000 hospital beds in use for covid. We have 2,000 beds. In other words, the predictions were way off. We didnt and the implication is they didnt do an enormous amount of the hard core lockdown and theyre still okay. What do you say to them . Well, i wouldnt say theyre okay. Theyre not suffering as widespread epidemic yet. If they open up enough, they can go back into exponential growth and compete with new york on that basis. The uncertainties about this mean that because of the exponential nature of this, y some models were wildly wrong. Models will never be perfect in these things but we can learn when you have countries that are sending, say, Young Children back to school, germany, denmark, austria have good enough testing regime, more confident than the u. S. , so they will be able to see the effect of that. Norway is actually doing it in a differential than different parts of the country that will help inform us. The problem with the United States, any state that goes too far and gets into that exponential growth will be seeding other parts of the country. It will be Like International travel, you have force of infection coming in, thats tricky to deal with. But, you know, the need for the testing piece, you know, i havent had anyone argue with it, but the theyre not stepping up to actually do it yet and thats got to be the federal level. So, everyone says when we open its going to be slow, its going to be parts of the economy. People have estimated 20 , 30 . Give us, you know, the best case scenario. You know, you heard this metaphor of the hammer and the dance. The dance being now you start opening up these the economy, and through kind of a moderate amount of social distancing, you are able to achieve what will we be able to achieve . What is the goodcase scenario . The best case, you pick the high value activities like school, manufacturing, construction and figure out a way to do those with kind of masks, distancing. In the school, you dont want the hallways to have tons of kids all at once or the lunch room. And then you can see, is that are those schools a source of infection spreading up into the elderly, which then would cause some level of mortality. Bill, can i can i just ask you about schools . Everyone is so so curious and worried about this. You have three kids. You know how schools work. Lots of people crowded together in classrooms, dormitories, hallways, thats the definition of school. How do you get it going . For the underaged kids where the online substitute is inferior more inferior than as you get up to the college level, then online can capture at least in terms of the academics a lot of what goes on. There, you know, what weve seen in terms of infection levels is pretty low. You do have some European Countries that are moving ahead with that. And because of their testing will understand what the viral load is and compare households with kids going to school versus households that dont have that coming in. So over the course of the summer some of that will be learned. And in the fall that will be one of the toughest questions. Its right on the boundary of is there a way to do it that particularly for the lowincome students where the Online Learning has not been fully enabled because, you know, they dont have the equipment or the connection or the teacher is not set up for it. You know, the inequity has gotten greater in education. So if we can figure out how to do k through 12 in the fall, that would be good. I even think if were creative about it and things have gone well, well be able to do college. But theres a lot of data that well be learning from globally and well see the progress on the tools as well that will inform those decisions. So, it will probably be in august where, you know, the idea of whats the protocol, how many schools are are opening up, and we wont really know enough until pretty close to the start. So, youve written both in your paper on gates notes, which i really recommend people read, and youve said elsewhere, the economy is not going to be anything like it was. Its going to take a long time to recover. People will be surprised at how slow and how fitful this is. So what is it that the stock market is seeing that you, bill gates, are not seeing . The stock market is now basically at a routine annual correction. It seems it has not really factored in, it seems to me, the kind of economy youre describing. Well, you know, some companies, their valuation, if you took out two years of earnings, theres still enough earnings that the valuation wont change that much. And, you know, so if you have companies that dont run into a liquidity problem, and whose longterm profitability is strong, then the valuation adjustment is not necessarily that dramatic. You do have an economy thats going to be operating at a lower level, that affects all sorts of spending. Theres no doubt that will be the case for years to come. And so that, you know, should affect overall valuations. Buying treasury bills right now doesnt seem that attractive. So im not im an expert on vaccines and therapy, i talk to people about the economy. Like you, i find it a little surprising where the market is. But, you know, im not going to focus on that. Are you surprised that microsoft, for example, is trading at the same price that it was in december before, you know, the coronavirus . You know, Tech Companies in some ways benefit from an acceleration of a move towards digital approaches, even though the next few years theyll have a lot of customers that theyll be helping out, giving free licenses to, where things wont be as strong. So, you know, if theres any sector of the economy where you could say, okay, its not that drastic of a change, you would probably pick that. Again, valuations is not is not where i add the most value. Next on gps, bill gates on china. Is that the country that is the villain of this crisis as President Trump has implied . Vep that family doesnt have to take out of their house. It relieves stress off of me to let me know im doing something good for the community, not just papa johns. Im doing something good for the community, a lot of folks ask me why their dishwasher doesnt get everything clean. I tell them, it may be your detergent. Thats why more dishwasher brands recommend cascade platinum. With the soaking, scrubbing and rinsing built right in. For sparklingclean dishes, the first time. Cascade platinum. Birthdays arent cancelled. Hope isnt quarantined. First words arent delayed. Caring isnt postponed. Courage isnt on hold. And love hasnt stopped. U. S. Bank thanks you for keeping all of our spirits strong. Weve donated millions to those in need and are always here for our customers and employees. Weve donated millions to those in need it only takes a second for an everyday item to become dangerous. Tide pods childguard pack helps keep your laundry pacs in a safe place and your child safer. Align, press and unzip. Tide pods. Keep them up. Keep them closed. Keep them safe. From fires and hurricanes in 90 years at farmers we thou