 Bill Gates likes to fancy himself as the goody-two-shoes of billionaires, right? He would never exploit his workers to the extent that Jeff Bezos does and he'd never act as douchey and public as Elon Musk does, although if you try to impose a wealth tax on him, then he might test that theory. But I mean, he really tries to project this image of purity and altruism and he wants to make it seem as if he should hoard all of this wealth because he's using this wealth exclusively to try to make the world a better place. And it's not just that he's trying to use his wealth to better the world as an individual. He's just pure. At every waking minute, he's constantly reading studies to find new ways to stop climate catastrophe. He is very immersed in the here and the now and very immersed in coming up with solutions. You know, this is a guy who reads thousands of pages of scientific reports, you know, every week. Sure, Dan. Mm, doubtful. But Bill Gates doesn't want you to know that he has done something recently that has made him one of the most evil people in the world, not just among billionaires, but humanity's offering, one of the worst, because New Republic explains that Bill Gates impeded global access to covid vaccines through his hallowed foundation, the world's de facto public health czar has been a stalwart defender of monopoly medicine. Now, this article is so long and comprehensive, but it's also groundbreaking. And I would encourage you to pause this video and just go read that article if you have the time. Having said that, though, I can't get to everything in this article, but I'm going to try to give you the breakdown because what this describes is that Bill Gates screwed the world when it comes to covid vaccines. He's created the global apartheid system that we're all dealing with currently. He's the reason why developing countries may not actually get the covid vaccine until 2024. Now, to give you some context at the start of the pandemic, before it was even declared a pandemic, there was a meeting from the global community that formulated CTAB, which is a commitment to share knowledge, intellectual property and data all related to the novel coronavirus because they agreed that eradicating the virus, it was a global effort because no country would be safe unless all countries are safe. So there was no reason to hoard information, hoard medicine, intellectual property. Although this commitment to openness and sharing knowledge, it didn't actually bear out. Why? Because of Bill Gates. As New Republic's Alexander Zaitchik explains in April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world's scientific response to the pandemic. Gates's Covid-19 Act Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially and in contrast to the CTAB, the accelerator enshrined Gates's longstanding commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. It's implicit arguments that intellectual property rights won't represent problems from meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access and that they must be protected even during a pandemic. Carried the enormous weight of Gates's reputation as a wise, beneficent and prophetic leader, how he's developed and wielded this influence over two decades as one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic entering year two. This response has been defined by a zero sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side. Gates's Marquis Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on March 11th of 2020, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with MasterCord and the charity group, the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus, doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance. The accelerator reflected Gates's familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates's dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic even before he and his foundation's officers began to say so publicly. This was confirmed when a bigger version of the accelerator was unveiled the following month at The Who. The access to Covid-19 tools accelerator or ACT accelerator was Gates's bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing, the biggest and most consequential arm COVAX proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by and sales to richer ones. The goal was always limited. It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low to middle income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a people's vaccine warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access with intellectual property at the center of both. Gates not only dismissed these warnings, but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the accelerator's intellectual property based charity agenda. One year later, ACT accelerator has failed to meet its goal of providing discounted vaccines to the priority fifth of low income populations. The drug companies and rich nations that had so much praise for the initiative a year ago have retreated into bilateral deals that leave little for anybody else. As of this writing in early April, fewer than 600 million vaccine doses have been administered around the world. Three quarters of those in just 10 mostly high income countries close to 130 countries containing 2.5 billion people have yet to administer a single dose, the timeline for supplying poor and middle income countries with enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity. Meanwhile, has been pushed into 2024. These numbers represent more than the catastrophic moral failure. The director general of the WHO warned about this January. Technically housed within the WHO, the ACT accelerator is a Gates operation top to bottom. It is designed, managed and staffed largely by Gates organization employees. It embodies Gates's philanthropic approach to widely anticipated problems posed by intellectual property hoarding companies able to constrain global production by prioritizing rich countries and inhibiting licensing. Companies partnering with COVAX are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual nods to equitable access that have never been enforced. Crucially, the companies retain exclusive rights to their intellectual property. If they stray from the Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights, they are quickly brought to heel. When the director of Oxford's Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to its COVAX supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, Gates intervened as reported by Kaiser Health News. A few weeks later, Oxford urged on by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reversed course and signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant soul rights and no guarantee of low prices. So I just want to stop right there because we just consumed a lot of information, but let's just look at that last paragraph there, that last sentence in particular. So Oxford, they developed this vaccine that would go on to be the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine and originally they wanted to make sure that this vaccine was available on the public domain so smaller developing countries can use what they created and replicate that manufacture generic versions of COVID vaccines so they could vaccinate their own populations faster and not have to wait until 2024. But they had a change of heart when Bill Gates intervened. And if you're asking yourself, yeah, will he intervene? But what did he say? Like, what could get them to change their mind about something that would very obviously be a net benefit for world health? Well, it's not necessarily what he said. It's what he could do if they don't listen, because when you go to the website of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, you will see that they've given Oxford millions of dollars in grants in 2020 and they even gave them a grant for 2021. So if they don't comply with the demands of a man who's a gigantic source of funding that they rely on, he could easily pull funding from them like that. In other words, they probably felt like they had no choice but to comply if they're going to continue to get this funding that they desperately rely on. Bill Gates stopped Oxford from making their vaccine public, which would be objectively good for smaller countries. Now, if you're one of the folks who think, you know what? I live in the UK, in the United States, in a developed country. And I'm not necessarily worried about myself getting the vaccine. And I mean, I don't really care about these smaller countries. It doesn't work that way. This is a pandemic and we're not protected fully until everyone in the world is protected. So let me explain to you what could happen as a result of Bill Gates and him pushing vaccine apartheid. Let's say we get 90 percent of the population in the United States vaccinated by the end of the year, and it seems as if the pandemic has come to an end. Well, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, what if they don't actually vaccinate enough people and the virus continues to spread to the point where new mutations emerge that are resistant to the vaccine that we've used to inoculate all of our citizens? What happens then? All of us are fucked. The pandemic continues for who knows how much longer? All because he wants to protect the intellectual property of these big pharma giants. And really, it's not about the intellectual property per se, but it's about them being the sole manufacturers of these vaccines. They don't want to allow for a generic version to be made because they want to be the ones to profit off of it. Bill Gates, perpetuating that. Absolutely morally reprehensible, objectively terrible for the human species. For a man who's tried to build this reputation of stopping catastrophic climate change and saving humanity. What he did. To foster this atmosphere of global vaccine apartheid could very well fuck over the entire world because he's a greedy prick with a lot of influence who is using said influence. To get international institutions to be greedy and hoard knowledge about the vaccines that could be life saving, that will be life saving if developed countries were able to make them themselves and didn't have to rely on Moderna or Pfizer to give them to them. Now, when he's challenged about this, this next part of the story explains that his response is to just be completely condescending and laugh off the criticism. Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers in recent months as the debate has shifted from the who to the WTO reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter century ago. When a fast company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration before snapping, quote, it's irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn't about IP. In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue who represent the poor majority of the global population as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner, quote, it's the classic situation in global health where the advocates all of a sudden want the vaccine for zero dollars and right away, he told Reuters in late January, Gates has lauded the insults with comments that equate state protected and publicly funded monopolies with the free market, quote, North Korea doesn't have that many vaccines. As far as we can tell, he told the New York Times in November. It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple COVID-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing. The closest Gates has come to conceding that vaccine monopolies inhibit production came during a January interview with South Africa's male and guardian asked about the growing intellectual property debate. He responded at this point, changing the rules, wouldn't make any additional vaccines available. In other words, oops, looks like it's too late to reverse course. Now looks like we're going to have to do it my way. Teehee, this is pure evilness. I don't know what else to call it. If for whatever reason, some sort of mutation that's resistant to the vaccines that exist now pops up because we don't vaccinate enough human beings throughout the world fast enough, Bill Gates is largely to thank for that. So regardless of the public image that he tries to promote, this individual is not your friend. This is not a good billionaire. That's not a thing. This is a greedy oligarch who's using his wealth and influence to fuck over developing countries. That's who Bill Gates is.