Jeffrey Tucker explains Bill Gates’confusion in his Brownstone article Why Bill Gates Is Pivoting on Existing Covid Vaccines. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
In a surprising interview, Bill Gates said the following: “We didn’t have vaccines that block transmission. We got vaccines that help you with your health, but they only slightly reduce the transmission. We need new ways of doing vaccines.”
It’s odd how he speaks of medicines as if they are like software. Try it out, observe how it works. When you find a problem, put the technicians to work. Every new iteration is an experiment. Free to try until you finally buy. Surely over time, we’ll find the answer to the problem of blocking or blotting out pathogens.
Software. Hardware. Applications. Subscriptions! This is how he thinks, as if the human body and its deadly dance with viruses is a recent problem and we are only at the very beginning of finding solutions, without realizing that this reality has been present for the whole of human existence and that we had tremendous success in the course of the 20th century minimizing bad pathogenic outcomes without his guidance and benefaction.
Essentially, he has long promoted the idea that traditional public health praxis was for the analog age; in the digital age, we need government planning, advanced technology, mass surveillance, and the ability to control human beings the way a software company manages personal computers.
Most people have no idea how such a rich and smart person could be so dim on essential matters of complex cell biology. Hacking the human body, improving it with uploads and downloads, is surely a more ominous challenge than inventing and managing man-made computers. So herein I try to present the reasons for Gates’s way of thinking.
Let’s travel back in time to examine his career at Microsoft and his shepherding into existence the Windows operating system. By the early 1990s, it was being billed as the essential brain of the personal computer. Security considerations against viruses were not part of its design, however, simply because not that many people were using the internet so the threat level was low. The browser was not invented until 1995. Security of personal computers was not really a question that Microsoft had dealt with.
The neglect of this consideration turned into a disaster. By the early 2000s, there were thousands of versions of malware (also called bugs) floating around the internet and infecting computers running Windows worldwide. They ate hard drive. They sucked out data. They forced ads on people. They invaded your space with strange popups. They were wrecking the user experience and threatening the future of an entire industry.
The problem of malware was dubbed viruses. It was a metaphor. Not real. It’s not clear that Gates ever really understood that. Computer viruses aren’t anything like biological viruses. To maintain a clean and functioning hard drive, you want to avoid and block a computer virus at all costs. Any exposure is bad exposure. The fix is always avoidance until eradication.
With biological viruses, we have evolved to confront them through exposure and let our immune system develop to take them on.
A body that blocks all pathogens without immunity is a weak one that will die at the first exposure, which will certainly come at some point in a modern society. An immune system that confronts most viruses and recovers grows stronger. That’s a gigantic difference that Gates never understood.
Regardless, the advent of the army of computer pathogens fundamentally threatened his proudest achievement. Microsoft frantically searched for a solution, but the creativity of the malware army moved too fast for its engineers.
Others sensed an opportunity. Companies specializing in anti-virus software had been doing business since the 1990s but grew more sophisticated in the early 2000s. Once the internet became fast enough, these software packages could be updated daily. There were ever newer companies, each with a different method and a different marketing and pricing model.
Eventually, the problem was mostly solved on the personal computer, but it took ten years. Even now, Microsoft’s products are less protected than Apple’s, and Microsoft has yet to come close to mitigating the problem of spam on its own native email client.
In short, keeping viruses out of computers constitutes the single biggest professional struggle in Gates’ life. The lesson he learned was that pathogen blocking and eradication was always the path forward. What he never really understood is that the word virus was merely a metaphor for unwanted and unwelcome computer code. The analogy breaks down in real life.
After finally stepping back from Microsoft’s operations, Gates started dabbling in other areas, as newly rich people tend to do. They often imagine themselves especially competent at taking on challenges that others have failed at simply because of their professional successes. Also by this point in his career, he was only surrounded by sycophants who would not interrupt his descent into crankiness.
And what subject did he pounce on? He would do to the world of pathogens what he did at Microsoft: he would stamp them out! He began with malaria and other issues and eventually decided to take on them all. And what was his solution? Of course: antivirus software. What is that? It is vaccines. Your body is the hard drive that he would save with his software-style solution.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I noted that Gates was pushing hard for lockdowns. His foundation was now funding research labs the world over with billions of dollars, plus universities and direct grants to scientists. He was also investing heavily in vaccine companies.
Early on in the pandemic, to get a sense of Gates’s views, I watched his TED talks. I began to realize something astonishing. He knew much less than anyone could discover by reading a book on cell biology from Amazon. He couldn’t even give a basic 9th-grade-level explanation of viruses and their interaction with the human body. And yet here he was lecturing the world about the coming pathogen and what should be done about it. His answer is always the same: more surveillance, more control, more technology.
Once you understand the simplicity of his core confusions, everything else he says makes sense from his point of view. He seems forever stuck in the fallacy that the human being is a cog in a massive machine called society that cries out for his managerial and technological leadership to improve to the point of operational perfection.
The rich, their pretenses, their influence: sometimes charming, sometimes beneficent, sometimes deeply malicious. Gates’s influence over epidemiology has been tremendously baneful, but it’s unclear whether he even knows it. In fact, I don’t think that he does. In some ways, that’s even more dangerous.
Readers might be quick to point out that Gates has benefited enormously from lockdowns and vaccine mandates, both seeing his former company grow to enormous size and from his stock ownership in vaccine makers. So yes, his ignorance has been rewarded handsomely.
As for his influence on the world, history will not likely be forgiving.
Science Matters 
Reblogged this on muunyayo .
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I’m not a big fan of Gates but, actually, the analogy between biological & computer viruses is a good one. Both are pieces of code that consist of instructions to subvert the normal functioning of the target machine (human or computer). DNA/RNA are analogous to computer code.
These rogue pieces of code are usually smuggled into the target encapsulated in a protective layer that seeks to dodge the normal “naive” defences. The viral coat (capsid) surrounding the biological virus is analogous to the Trojan horse or other strategies employed to cloak computer viral code when it arrives via an email or USB.
Once inserted, the virus typically hijacks the operating system of the target (rather than the hard drive) and replicates itself in an effort to propagate the infection to new victims (human or machine).
Anti-virus software is analogous to a vaccine in that it provides the machine (human) with a description of the structure of the virus (or key visible parts of it). This allows the machine to identify the intruder and defend itself by quarantining the invader, incapacitating it or denying it access to the parts of the operating system that it needs to replicate itself and/or cause damage.
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Phil, thanks for commenting and explaining the analogy so well. Sure there’s an analogy, and like all of them, it is reducing reality dangerously when taken too far, in this case confusing humans with machines. So we are just nodes in a distributed network waiting to be programmed by our masters? Goodby consciousness, goodby free will, individual autonomy and responsibility. That is a not a model of a body politic, or a republic to which I can subscribe.
A major lesson of this pandemic is the reminder that experts live in their limited domains, and can confuse their personal interest with the public interest. A stark reminder of the axiom: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Vaccines have their place but, the denigration and prohibiting of safe, effective, and cheap anti-viral medications gave the game away. Because medications empower individuals to be in charge of their own health care, wellness which goes way beyond combating the effects of one virus.
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Hi Ron…..Many thanks for your reply…..very much appreciated, as is your site, in general. I read all your posts.
Re the viral analogy comment, I was merely attempting to clarify the similarities between these rogue actors and how they operate in the real world, whether in a biological or in a computer environment. I was also trying the highlight the similarities between the primed immune system (whether via vaccine or infection) and anti-virus software. In both of these scenarios, the system has been exposed to fragments of the rogue invader so it can be identified and either neutralised or quarantined if it tries to gain entry.
From these perspectives, the term “virus” is a very apt moniker for rogue computer code. The code is (usually) self-replicating, tries to infect other machines and uses the computer’s own operating system to achieve its goals. It is harmless UNLESS it has access to a computer running the target operating system. Similarly, viruses are “obligate intracellular parasites”……they can only do harm once they gain access to a cell and hijack its operating system (ie the DNA/RNA replication and protein synthesis machinery of the cell). They then go on to wreak mayhem and infect others.
Finally, re the use of pharmaceuticals to fight the real world Corona virus, I have no problem with that approach and, personally, I would have happily taken any repurposed drug (eg hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin) prophylactically, if they had been properly evaluated. I think that several potentially-useful drugs were deliberately “dissed” by the media and medical establishment without proper assessment and this had more to do with politics than pharmacology. The irrational, blind hatred of President Trump and anyone else who challenged the dominant narrative was clear to see from the start.
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Dear Ron
Many thanks for your post. Sadly Bill Gates cannot be trusted with vaccines, let alone his software. The viruses on Windows software possibly arise from defects in the software and updates. I found out last year that some updates could not be removed from WIndows 10. I tried but they had replicated themselves when I looked again, I think the following day.
As regards vaccines these are pointless. I used to think otherwise, until at 60 years old last year I researched properly. I changed my mind.
As regards the ‘flu, now known as Covid 19 since re-branding last year, this is toxicosis of the body caused by metabolism as we break down food for energy. The main poison produce is urea, fine in the soil, but not in our bodies.
Other toxicosis arises because of the numerous toxins in the air, food and water around us.
Vaccines will only cause harm or sometimes death if they do anything at all as they are merely poisons unless they are a placebo.
It is like playing Russian roulette with your body. If your immune system is OK then side effects will be minimal if any. If not so good then effects will be noticeable to a varying degree. If very poor then the likelihood is that the body will be overwhelmed and death will occur.
Please note if you research on line you will find a lot of people who have taken the vaccine and received serious side effects. Others have recorded the deaths of loved ones after they had the vaccines.
History is littered with side effects and deaths from vaccines for other diseases. This is not difficult to research online.
The real pandemic is vitamin D deficiency, a serious issue due to increased indoor living and working.
If you are interested here is a link to vaccines. I do use humour as necessary on my site to lighten the mood and to help make the points.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/v-is-for-vaccination/
Some people say the vaccine is free, but of course people pay via taxation; how many would get the vaccine if you had to pay directly for it, and not via taxation, I wonder.
Finally I might add that Phil Rae’s comment is good. Hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin are as I understand it very useful to deal with the toxicosis. But of course this doesn’t make large amounts of money for big pharma. Which is no doubt part of the irrational hatred of Donald Trump.
Kind regards
Baldmichael Theresoluteprotector’sson
Please excuse the nom-de-plume, this is as much for fun as a riddle for people to solve if they wish.
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Thanks for commenting Baldmichael. I would have shortened that to BM, but you could take that the wrong way. I suppose part of my distrust of Gates and Big Tech in general comes from my experience as a Wiindows user. They say you can specify when your machine is not available for updating, but somehow frequently (usually when you have a time-sensitive project) Microsoft reminds you that the machine is theirs not yours. All the resources–CPU, RAM and Disk are devoted to the masters’ tasks, and the supposed owner/user can go take a long hike off a short pier.
Unfortunately, these devices are addictive and now essential to our lifestyles, so they have us in their power. Will they go too far and provoke a backlash? Certainly, but will the backlashers prevail?
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