Originally published August 20, 2024
There’s a curious anachronism in an opinion piece written by Bill Gates and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on February 28, 2020, spotted by Thomas Verduyn in comments on “Is Bill Gates an Extraordinary Visionary?”.
Gates says Covid-19 pandemic almost two weeks before the WHO pandemic declaration on March 11, 2020.
“In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: Solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again. The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point.” – Bill Gates, 28 February 2020
February 28th was the same day the Report of the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Diseases 2019 was published.
Maybe NEJM was supposed to hold the letter until the official pandemic declaration and someone hit “publish” too soon, thinking the report announced a pandemic had arrived?
I was curious enough about it to email NEJM. Scroll down for the full exchange.
In summary, the media relations staffer for the journal suggested Gates’ use of Covid-19 pandemic isn’t out of place because ‘pandemic’ means widespread occurrence of an infectious disease over a country or the world at a point in time, ‘pandemic’ can be used when a situation meets that definition, and Gates and other experts were already using the word ‘pandemic’ to characterize Covid-19 prior to the WHO’s declaration on March 11, 2020.
I countered those points in my response (see last email in thread) and am awaiting another reply. I recall plenty of people saying in February 2020 that COVID-19 could/would/should be declared a pandemic, but not experts and commenters definitively calling it a pandemic until the WHO said it was. For example, The New York Times was saying “a pandemic could be on the horizon” – and quoting experts on the difference between an epidemic versus a pandemic – on the day Gates’ NEJM op-ed debuted.
Pun intended with headline on “who’s talking”?
Bill Gates has been massively invested in the pandemic preparedness industry for decades and was never shy about his hope for a pandemic problem that vaccine research could solve.
Given that the WHO was writing letters to Jack Ma in February 2020, there’s a good chance the American billionaire who was convinced a spreading disease could wipe out 30 million people in six months was also getting updates and would have been told in advance that the moment that he (and many others) had been waiting for was about to arrive.
Emails between J. Hockett and New England Journal of Medicine media relations
The media representative asked me to clarify whether I was from a particular media outlet. I wrote:
She replied:
I said:
There was no further response.
The definitions and assumptions from the NEJM media relations are instructive with respect to the timing and mechanism of ‘spread’.
Gates’ pre-emption of the WHO declaration shows he was confident about ‘solutions’ and looking forward to the months ahead.
The archived comments on original Substack version of this article are worth a read: https://web.archive.org/web/20240904031659/https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/bill-gates-anachronistic-use-of-covid/comments
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