Says there will be another pandemic while expressing hope for an ‘eradication vaccine’
Billionaire Bill Gates says the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant has spread faster across the world than the COVID-19 vaccines have, and that the variant is a “type of vaccine” that gives people cellular immunity. He also predicted on Feb. 18 that another pandemic was coming, and shared what he believes should be done “next time.”
At the 2022 Munich Security Conference, attended by security experts, politicians, and people of influence around the world, the Microsoft co-founder was asked: “Where would you assess where we are today in beating COVID-19?”
“Well, sadly, the virus itself, particularly the variant called Omicron, is the type of vaccine—that is, it creates both B cell and T cell immunity—and it’s done a better job of getting out to the world population than we have with vaccines,” Gates said.
B cell and T cell immunity, also referred to as cellular immunity, comprise alternate mechanisms of immunity than antibodies. A study published in Nature suggests that the immune system’s T cells may offer protection against COVID-19 by “remembering past encounters with other human coronaviruses.”
Meanwhile, a study published in the medical journal Cell (pdf) said that data suggests “SARS-CoV-2 elicits broadly directed and functionally replete memory T cell responses, suggesting that natural exposure or infection may prevent recurrent episodes of severe COVID-19.”
Gates told the conference that the risk of severe disease from contracting COVID-19 has been dramatically reduced due to people having been exposed to various variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“If you do serosurveys in African countries, you get well over 80 percent of people [who] have been exposed either to the vaccine or to various variants. And so what that does is it means the chance of severe disease—which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes—those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure,” he said.
The Omicron variant, since its identification in November 2021, has spread rapidly across the world to become the most dominant variant, although it generally triggers much milder symptoms.
