4月24日在盖茨基金会上发表了一篇关于新冠（COVID-19）的详尽文章之后，比尔·盖茨接受《TheLateShow》节目采访，并和扣扣熊（StephenColbert）的交谈中表达了相同的观点：疫苗是疫情破局的关键。  

在针对现阶段药物治疗以及未来长期的疫苗研制成功方面，盖茨向扣扣熊说道：“至于治愈率超出95%的奇迹疗法，我们不能指望这一点。另一种解决方案就是向全世界人工推广高效的疫苗。我们所了解的部分疫苗会在今年夏季的时候进入人体体内，我们会观察是否会出现强烈的抗体反应，然后我们还需要进行广泛的安全性测试，最后才开始生产。”  

盖茨表示目标是选择一到两种最好的疫苗，并为全世界人口进行疫苗接种——如果是单剂疫苗，那么就需要70亿剂；如果是两剂疫苗，则为140亿剂。全世界都将争相获得这些疫苗，因此生产疫苗的规模将是前所未有的，很可能需要多家公司参与。  

我常被问及大规模疫苗接种何时可以开始。和美国权威的公共卫生官员们的估计一样，我认为可能需要18个月，尽管也可能短至9个月或长至近2年。关键在于3期试验的时长，这将充分确保安全性和有效性。

>> stephen: welcome back, everybody. joining me now is the co-founder of microsoft and coe chair of the bill and melinda gates foundation. please welcome bill gates. hi, thanks for joining us. 

>> nice to see your house. 

>> stephen: it's nice to see yours, too, unless you're broadcasting from the billionaire bunker on the moon you share with jeff bezos. 

>> yeah, at the club. 

>> stephen: whose night is it to cook, elon musk's? 

>> absolutely. 

>> stephen: well, sir, everybody's talking about the ted talk you gave in 2015 about the crisis that a coming pandemic would mean. why was this so obvious to you and others that this was something that we had to prepare for? 

>> well, once a disease is human-to-human trance admissible, then it -- transmissible, thent it can spread across the globe because there's so much more international travel, we're more at risk today than any time in history. a flu or a coronavirus like that literally could kill tens of millions. so we should have practiced. we should have said who's going contact tracing, and gotten the interventions -- diagnostics, drugs, vaccines -- so they're ready to go much faster. sadly, very little of that was done. 

>> stephen: if i'm not mistaken, those are things you're saying needed to be prepared in 2015. did anybody listen? 

>> yes, there was a little bit of work done, maybe about 5% of what should have been done, a group called coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations created, made a progress on a few of these vaccine platforms actually that are amongst the first now that are going into human trials.

>> stephen: you released a memo today that says global innovation is the key to limiting the damage. what innovation are you talking about? what's the number one priority? t what do we have to innovate first? 

>> well, in the near term, it's the scaling up of testing and prioritizing who gets testing and getting the quick results. in the midterm, it's these treatments that can cut the death rate down potentially dramatically, and then the final solution, which is a year to two years off, is the vaccine. so we've got to go full-speed ahead on all three fronts. 

>> stephen: just to head off the conspiracy theorists, maybe we shouldn't call the vaccine the final solution, maybe just the best solution, okay. 

>> yeah, the return to normal solution. 

>> stephen: exactly. are you aware that there are people out there who have these conspiracy these are that this was created by you to inoculated everyone in the world and put a chip into their blood so you can track them? 

>> yeah, that's very strange that the organization that's about saving lives and warning, you know, gets attacked as though we were somehow connected to it. 

>> stephen: well, you don't save our lives, you can't control our brains. now, you say that the medicines or the treatments that are out there right now, what are the things that you -- do you have -- do you have any knowledge of something that is sort of a leading candidate to treat the coronavirus right now? 

>> there's many that i'm very hopeful about. the one that is maybe the most promising is taking the blood of recovered patients, the plasma, and then being able to put that back into people who have the disease. that has a reasonable chance of working and in the next few months will get data about that. you can concentrate the plasma down, so the amount you need to give to help somebody is actually pretty small. so even in developing countries, this is intervention that could be scaled up and could work in a powerful way. 

>> stephen: do you have any sense of where the world is on testing right now? is there a cheap and easy test coming down the pipe that we haven't heard about? 

>> well, the testing capacity if you're organized properly is high. the p.c.r. machines, there's a lot of them out there, but the government has to find them and tell people who should be prioritized to have access to those machines. in the meantime, there are innovations like a test -- an at-home test that we could have as soon as a few months from now that would add to at the overall capacity, and that's really important because you're blind. without quick results, prioritized testing, you're blind whether your policies are going to cause a surge that would put us back into the bad situation we have right now. 

>> stephen: so if there is not wide testing, is there any way to know what the next proper step would be? 

>> well, you will always eventually see if you've made a mistake and you open up too much because your i.c.u.s will fill up and your deaths will go back. what you would like is to catch it literally three weeks before that by seeing the positive tests go up, and then you will go too far and certain activities need to be restricted even more than you have been doing. clearly, right now, in most parts to have the u.s., you know, the infection rate is starting to go down. well, that's good news, but, of course, no one wants to stay in this lockdown. so understanding which things create low risk and high benefit, that's the challenge in policy we have today. 

>> stephen: now, it's easy for us to say that the lockdown should continue because you're doing fine financially, and i'm still working my job because of the technology that we have, but there are 26 million people, perhaps more, out there who are out of a job right now, and it is perfectly reasonable to want things to open up as quickly as we can. do you have any advice to these people, any words of patience or hope for them as to how we can to it best? 

>> well, we will get back to normal, but we're going to have a pretty long period of semi-normal, and -- 

>> stephen: what does semi-normal mean? 

>> that people will still be afraid. you're not likely to fill a stadium or a theme park, even if the government said please, please do, you know, people want to protect their health, they don't want to infect their parents. so a lot of business models where you have to fill up planes or restaurants, they just aren't going to work until we can appropriately get the risk of infection down very dramatically. so i'm very hopeful that things like manufacturing and construction with the right protocols or even school with the right protocols, we can gelt those going, but we won't be able to do everything, because we saw that cause that exponential increase that, unfortunately, we caught it in time before it got to the whole population, but not before substantial deaths. 

>> stephen: now, i've heard a lot about contact tracing. you said that's very important. how do you do that? what is contact tracing? 

>> well, the idea is that if i test positive, we want to make sure that anybody who i might have infected finds out very quickly before they infect someone else, and this pcr test is actually quite sensitive, so we need to find out who those people are that you can name and the locations you have been to, and not only does that help us for that individual case, it gives us a pattern of what's going on, you know, why is meat packing, you know, associated widespread, could you change that. cruise ships first showed us how tough close quarters are for it. so contact tracing, we need to step up for that. we need to get that data. the countries like south korea and germany, who have done this well, they have been able to avoid the lockdown, and this is what will help us avoid the rebound. 

>> stephen: the u.s. has cut funding to the w.h.o., and, now, you said, in a tweet last week, that this is just as dangerous as it sounds. how dangerous does it sound to you? 

>> well, the w.h.o., is you know, a small organization -- smaller organization than people think. it's about a thousand the budget of the u.s. healthcare system, but it is where people come together to talk about the drugs and the testing and the statistics. so i think, once the u.s. steps back and looks at this, they won't cut the funding. they'll actually increase the funding because w.h.o.'s playing that central role. it's fine to say, like everyone, they could have reacted in different ways, but we need them. we need them to pull together all the scientific knowledge and get guidelines out to the countries of the world. so i'm pretty sure that we won't actually defund them because telling them to fire their people, you know, right now when we most need them would be a mistake. 

>> stephen: bill, if you can just hunker down in the bunker, we'll be right back with more bill gates.

往期精彩英语演讲集

防止未来失联

请长按识别二维码关注备用号

想第一时间接收英语演讲文章&视频？把精彩英语演讲设置为星标就对了！操作办法就是：进入公众号——点击右上角的●●●——找到“设为星标”点击即可。

 点击阅读原文查看更多精彩英语演讲！