Gates Versus The Pandemic

Without the efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Covid-19 crisis would almost certainly be worse. But it's extensive role raises questions about how much we rely on philantrophy.

- By Adele Peters. Ilustrations by Sarah Gonzales

In the evening of friday, february 14, Bill Gates sat down for a seafood dinner in Seattle. It wasn't a Valentine's Day; Melinda, his wife of 26 years, couldn't attend. He was grabbing takeout with a handful of experts who worked with him at the headquarters of the foundation that he and Melinda co-founded in 2000 to take on global health challenges. As it drizzled outside, he pressed them on the current state of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China, where thousands of people had fallen sick. A small number of cases were now beginning to show up in other parts of the world.

“I kept saying, ‘Hey, won’t China be able to keep it from spreading to other countries?’ ” he tells me when we chat in late June. “They said, ‘No, there’s less than a 25% chance that this will be contained to China.’ I thought, Oh, my God. . . . This is mindblowing. Here it is.”