‘We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate’

Art Moore
WND News Center

Billionaire philanthropist and vaccine promoter Bill Gates acknowledged at an event in New York City this week that the COVID-19 case fatality rate was relatively low, saying the world “just got lucky.”

“I have to say, given the toll of this pandemic, 20 million dead globally, a million in the U.S., and it could have been way more fatal. We just got lucky that the death rate per case was like 0.2%,” Gates told Time senior correspondent Alice Park at the TIME 100 event.

One month ago, Gates elaborated on the implications of the low death rate while insisting that at the beginning of the pandemic that fact was not known.

“At that point we really didn’t understand the fatality rate – , and that it’s a disease mainly of the elderly, kind of like the flu, although a bit different,” he said in an early May interview with Fareed Zakaria in New York City to promote his new book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.”

“We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.”

– Bill Gatespic.twitter.com/qKi1sx43nl

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) May 6, 2022

But as early as March 2020 – after the World Health Organization estimated the rate was an alarming 3.4% – scientists were estimating that the rate was not exponentially greater than the seasonal flu and that the deaths were largely among people who had outlived average life expectancy and had multiple chronic illnesses.

In fact, Dr. Anthony Fauci co-authored an article published March 26, 2020, in the New England Journal of Medicine predicting the fatality rate for the coronavirus would turn out to be like that of a “severe seasonal influenza.” In an exceptionally bad flu season, the case fatality rate is about one-tenth of 1 percent, the authors wrote.

Further, on April 10, 2020, Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorf wrote that “since COVID-19 operates in a highly age specific manner, mandated counter measures must also be age specific. If not, lives will be unnecessarily lost.”

That was the premise behind the Great Barrington Declaration that he later co-authored with epidemiologists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford.

The declaration, published in October 2020, criticized COVID-19 measures, particularly universal lockdowns, calling instead for focused protection of the vulnerable older population based on data showing they are more than a thousand times more likely to die from COVID infection than the young.

At the World Economic Forum’s summit in Davos, Switzerland, on May 22, Gates dismantled the rationale for vaccine mandates and passports.

“The idea of checking if people are vaccinated – you know if you have breakthrough infections – what’s the point?” he asked.