The solution to preventing future pandemics involves globalism and international oversight, according to billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Gates has spent quite a bit of his own wealth and time researching pandemics: Through his philanthropy — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — the Microsoft co-founder has donated billions of dollars to funding pandemic research and preparedness.
On Monday, Gates sat down with the Lowry Institute, an Australian think tank based in Syndey, to talk about global challenges the world may soon face in the near future.
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When asked how the world should prepare, most of Gates’s proposed solutions involve international governance.
At one point, the billionaire went as far as to suggest appointing a “global group” to score countries based on whether they are following certain standards.
“We need to be doing, every five years, a really comprehensive exercise, at both country and regional level, of pandemic preparedness and we need a global group that’s kind of scoring everybody, and saying, hey, if you’re not participating in this you could be the source of the next pandemic, and that’s bad for the entire world. This is like a fire that goes global,” Gates said.
One such standard Gates said countries should follow is strict lockdowns.
The billionaire went out of his way to recognize Australia for its use of the controversial practice.
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“Some of the things that stand out would be that Australia and about seven other countries did population-scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies … that meant that you kept — in that first year, when there were no vaccines … the level of infection low,” he said.
This is despite the fact that both right- and left-wing outlets have characterized Australia’s COVID response as an overreach of governmental authority and an undue violation of personal freedoms.
Gates’ proposed solutions fall in line with the idea of a global “Great Reset,” an initiative proposed by the World Economic Forum, a prominent international organization that often lobbies for international cooperation and coordination between governments.
The Great Reset is described by the WEF as a shift toward such policies that need to take place in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not all policy experts agree that international regulations are the correct solution going forward, however.
Writing for The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, multiple policy experts forwarded the notion that free trade on both the national and global level is a better path forward.
“In times of uncertainty, it’s natural that people look to their governments for answers. Yet the lasting solutions to our current economic problems do not lie in more government controls and regulations. They lie in a return to free market principles,” Anthony B. Kim, an expert on economics and free trade, wrote in response to WEF’s Great Reset plans in November 2020.
“Economically free and dynamic societies can provide the effective response and resilience we need now in resurrecting our livelihoods. Restoring what we know has worked in the past is the only ‘reset’ the world needs.”
In an article published in February 2021, The Foundation for Economic Education’s Hannah Cox laid out eight ways in which government interference made the pandemic worse.
The list included miscommunication and dishonesty from government officials, burdensome regulations, the blocking of free-market testing, delayed vaccine development, lockdowns, policies leading to excess deaths in nursing homes, schools unable to open due to the influence of teacher’s unions, the botched distribution of CARES Act funds and a disorganized rollout of the vaccines.
“The government, no matter how big it gets, does not have the ability to protect us from the world’s numerous threats,” Cox wrote. “It can at best guard our liberties and give us the freedom we need to innovate and shield ourselves.”
“America has tried the big government route, it didn’t go so well. Moving forward, we should learn from this catastrophe and push for deregulation, limited government authority, and local control.”
