Co-chair of Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Bill Gates: Global Innovation Is The Key To Achieving A Return To Normal
Bill Gates, who gave a TED Talk about global pandemic preparedness in 2015, says scientific innovation in the areas of testing, therapeutic treatments and a coronavirus vaccine is the only way the world can return to "normal." #Colbert #StephenAtHome #BillGates
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About Bill Gates
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, faced renewed scrutiny in February 2026 following the release of Justice Department documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The documents included draft emails, apparently written by Epstein to himself, containing graphic and unverified allegations about Gates. Gates denied the claims in interviews, stating that he only attended dinners with Epstein, never went to Epstein's island, and never met any women through him. He said he regretted every minute spent with Epstein and apologized for the association. His ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, said in response to the documents that questions about the allegations were for her ex-husband to answer, not her. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Gates focused on global health and artificial intelligence. He announced a $50 million partnership between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI called "Horizon 1000," which aims to deploy AI tools in 1,000 primary healthcare clinics in Africa, starting in Rwanda. Gates described the initiative as a way to improve healthcare quality and efficiency by using AI to reduce paperwork and help patients communicate in their local languages. He also warned that global health funding cuts had led to an increase in childhood deaths for the first time in 25 years, with 4.8 million children under five dying in 2025 compared to 4.6 million the year before. Gates said the U.S. aid cuts were "abrupt and cruel" and expressed hope that funding would be restored.
Transcript (31 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Stephen Colbert0:05
Welcome back, everyone. Joining me now is the co-founder of Microsoft and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Please welcome Bill Gates. Hi, thanks for joining us.
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Bill Gates0:17
Nice to see your house.
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Stephen Colbert0:22
It's nice to see yours, too, unless you're broadcasting from the billionaire bunker on the moon you share with Jeff Bezos.
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Bill Gates0:33
Yeah, at the club.
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Stephen Colbert0:34
Whose night is it to cook, Elon Musk's?
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Bill Gates0:36
Absolutely.
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Stephen Colbert0:37
Well, sir, everybody's talking about the TED talk you gave in 2015 about the crisis that a coming pandemic would mean. Why was this so obvious to you and others that this was something that we had to prepare for?
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Bill Gates0:56
Well, once a disease is human-to-human transmissible, then it can spread across the globe because there's so much more international travel. We're more at risk today than any time in history. A flu or a coronavirus like that literally could kill tens of millions. So we should have practiced. We should have said who's going contact tracing, and gotten the interventions -- diagnostics, drugs, vaccines -- so they're ready to go much faster. Sadly, very little of that was done.
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Stephen Colbert1:31
If I'm not mistaken, those are things you're saying needed to be prepared in 2015. Did anybody listen?
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Bill Gates1:38
Yes, there was a little bit of work done, maybe about 5% of what should have been done. A group called Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations created, made progress on a few of these vaccine platforms actually that are amongst the first now that are going into human trials.
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Stephen Colbert1:57
You released a memo today that says global innovation is the key to limiting the damage. What innovation are you talking about? What's the number one priority? What do we have to innovate first?
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Bill Gates2:10
Well, in the near term, it's the scaling up of testing and prioritizing who gets testing and getting the quick results. In the midterm, it's these treatments that can cut the death rate down potentially dramatically, and then the final solution, which is a year to two years off, is the vaccine. So we've got to go full-speed ahead on all three fronts.
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Stephen Colbert2:35
Just to head off the conspiracy theorists, maybe we shouldn't call the vaccine the final solution, maybe just the best solution, okay.
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Bill Gates2:43
Yeah, the return to normal solution.
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Stephen Colbert2:45
Exactly. Are you aware that there are people out there who have these conspiracy theories that this was created by you to inoculate everyone in the world and put a chip into their blood so you can track them?
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Bill Gates2:59
Yeah, that's very strange that the organization that's about saving lives and warning, you know, gets attacked as though we were somehow connected to it.
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Stephen Colbert3:10
Well, you don't save our lives, you can't control our brains. (Laughter) Now, you say that the medicines or the treatments that are out there right now, what are the things that you -- do you have -- do you have any knowledge of something that is sort of a leading candidate to treat the coronavirus right now?
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Bill Gates3:32
There's many that I'm very hopeful about. The one that is maybe the most promising is taking the blood of recovered patients, the plasma, and then being able to put that back into people who have the disease. That has a reasonable chance of working, and in the next few months will get data about that. You can concentrate the plasma down, so the amount you need to give to help somebody is actually pretty small. So even in developing countries, this is intervention that could be scaled up and could work in a powerful way.
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Stephen Colbert4:12
Do you have any sense of where the world is on testing right now? Is there a cheap and easy test coming down the pipe that we haven't heard about?
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Bill Gates4:26
Well, the testing capacity if you're organized properly is high. The PCR machines, there's a lot of them out there, but the government has to find them and tell people who should be prioritized to have access to those machines. In the meantime, there are innovations like a test -- an at-home test that we could have as soon as a few months from now that would add to the overall capacity, and that's really important because you're blind. Without quick results, prioritized testing, you're blind whether your policies are going to cause a surge that would put us back into the bad situation we have right now.
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Stephen Colbert5:07
So if there is not wide testing, is there any way to know what the next proper step would be?
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Bill Gates5:16
Well, you will always eventually see if you've made a mistake and you open up too much because your ICUs will fill up and your deaths will go back. What you would like is to catch it literally three weeks before that by seeing the positive tests go up, and then you will go too far and certain activities need to be restricted even more than you have been doing. Clearly, right now, in most parts of the U.S., you know, the infection rate is starting to go down. Well, that's good news, but, of course, no one wants to stay in this lockdown. So understanding which things create low risk and high benefit, that's the challenge in policy we have today.
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Stephen Colbert6:01
Now, it's easy for us to say that the lockdown should continue because you're doing fine financially, and I'm still working my job because of the technology that we have, but there are 26 million people, perhaps more, out there who are out of a job right now, and it is perfectly reasonable to want things to open up as quickly as we can. Do you have any advice to these people, any words of patience or hope for them as to how we can get to it best?
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Bill Gates6:29
Well, we will get back to normal, but we're going to have a pretty long period of semi-normal, and --
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Stephen Colbert6:36
What does semi-normal mean?
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Bill Gates6:42
That people will still be afraid. You're not likely to fill a stadium or a theme park, even if the government said please, please do, you know, people want to protect their health, they don't want to infect their parents. So a lot of business models where you have to fill up planes or restaurants, they just aren't going to work until we can appropriately get the risk of infection down very dramatically. So I'm very hopeful that things like manufacturing and construction with the right protocols or even school with the right protocols, we can get those going, but we won't be able to do everything, because we saw that cause that exponential increase that, unfortunately, we caught it in time before it got to the whole population, but not before substantial deaths.
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Stephen Colbert7:35
Now, I've heard a lot about contact tracing. You said that's very important. How do you do that? What is contact tracing?
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Bill Gates7:43
Well, the idea is that if I test positive, we want to make sure that anybody who I might have infected finds out very quickly before they infect someone else, and this PCR test is actually quite sensitive, so we need to find out who those people are that you can name and the locations you have been to, and not only does that help us for that individual case, it gives us a pattern of what's going on, you know, why is meat packing, you know, associated widespread, could you change that. Cruise ships first showed us how tough close quarters are for it. So contact tracing, we need to step up for that. We need to get that data. The countries like South Korea and Germany, who have done this well, they have been able to avoid the lockdown, and this is what will help us avoid the rebound.
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Stephen Colbert8:42
The U.S. has cut funding to the W.H.O., and, now, you said, in a tweet last week, that this is just as dangerous as it sounds. How dangerous does it sound to you?
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Bill Gates8:55
Well, the W.H.O., is you know, a small organization -- smaller organization than people think. It's about a thousand the budget of the U.S. healthcare system, but it is where people come together to talk about the drugs and the testing and the statistics. So I think, once the U.S. steps back and looks at this, they won't cut the funding. They'll actually increase the funding because W.H.O.'s playing that central role. It's fine to say, like everyone, they could have reacted in different ways, but we need them. We need them to pull together all the scientific knowledge and get guidelines out to the countries of the world. So I'm pretty sure that we won't actually defund them because telling them to fire their people, you know, right now when we most need them would be a mistake.
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Stephen Colbert9:48
Bill, if you can just hunker down in the bunker, we'll be right back with more Bill Gates.