Scientists and companies weren't creating things like new vaccines. Now that we have this fund that's there to buy at the lowest price, but buy for those people these medicines, we see scientists everywhere coming up with those new tools.
I was announcing to the public, in 2006, that I'd be leaving Microsoft in a couple of years and focusing full-time on the foundation. That was the time at which we went back to New York and Warren [Buffett] announced these gifts to a number of foundations, with a very high percentage of it going to us and basically doubling our capacity.
Thinking about impact on children meant adding to the agenda, both the R&D agenda and the delivery agenda, but it's amazing news, even in the scale of other tragedies.
That it's a worldwide thing that families are better off.
I would certainly use my voice to try and avoid anything that undermines confidence, so that parents are using vaccines fully.
My innovation message, specifically including energy, happened to be the same week that on Monday and Tuesday I announced the Breakthrough Energy Venture Group. Then on that Tuesday afternoon, in December, was when I sat down with him. I explained the US has great science here, this is where the market for these things is going to be. It connects to less pollution, it connects to U.S. jobs, it connects to security, not needing the energy coming from far away.
Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved.
We're in a period of uncertainty about [Donald Trump] administration policies and the range of what might happen is particularly higher. I don't think that these R&D and innovation budgets will be substantially reduced.
I think there's even a chance that [R&D and innovation budgets] might be increased [during Donald Trump Administration] and we should go and make that case to the executive branch, to the Congress.
R&D generally has been a bipartisan thing, because in the IT space, in the medical space, the U.S., the benefits to ourselves and the world and our economy have been very, very clear. I'm hopeful we can make a very strong case there. Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.
I have this very positive view of the world getting better and better. The list of things that could be huge setbacks is not very long: A nuclear war, climate change and epidemics.
If there was an epidemic, that definitely would make people accept vaccines. I wouldn't hope for that, of course, but if you wanted people to love vaccines, an epidemic would remind them how magical they are.
Part of the magic of economic growth is how you educate people, and the leading economies have to stay in front of that. From an economic point of view, it affects competitiveness and creates jobs. Or from a social justice point of view, you can take someone in the bottom tier of income and let him compete to be a doctor or lawyer. The education system is the only reason the dream of equal opportunity has a chance of being delivered - and we're not running a good education system.
You have the refugee crisis triggered by Syria. That's got a lot of costs associated with it. Domestically, budgets are incredibly tight because the economy's not generating the growth that makes for easy trade-offs.
Talking to mothers, always brings it home because they're so anxious to do everything they can for their kids and so tragic for them.
President [George] Bush made the U.S. absolutely the leader, between its own PEPFAR, and it's been by far the biggest Global Fund donor. That's a legacy.
[Africa] is the one continent where you still have a lot more young people than old people. So making sure they're healthy, good nutrition, good education. That'll be important for the world.
The scientific understanding of some of these [childhood] diseases is advancing quite rapidly. There's some things like premature birth or nutrition, first day deaths that we need a lot more insights so that we can build the tools to solve those problems.
We got a malaria initiative, really a phenomenal time, even though in the early stages there was some uncertainty. Then of course [Barack] Obama, although he had budget constraints, he believed in these things; a lot of new initiatives, including in agriculture.
Even in some of our vaccine areas, like an AIDS vaccine, things have taken longer than we expected, but we have the pipeline of tools. The biological information that we have that gives us insights is fantastic.
Even for the diseases we don't focus on, cancer, heart disease, you're going to be way better off being sick 10 years from now than any time in the past.
It was really phenomenal [Warren Buffett donation]. It grew out of the friendship that we had and the fact that his plan to have his wife run the foundation and give things away changed when she tragically died.
Take agriculture, where we haven't done much, or sanitation; saying, "okay, we will be able to make a really huge effort there." It really energized the foundation and half of what we've gotten done in this last decade is because Warren [Buffett] trusted us.
We're creating this alliance, GAVI, that has helped buy the vaccines that were in the rich world but not getting to the poor kids, getting a very cheap price and figuring out the cold chain, getting the delivery right, and then funding research for new vaccines. A lot of them are coming along. We've got a meningitis vaccine out, got that through large parts of Africa. That has been a huge success.
We need to cooperate globally on epidemic preparedness and prevention in the same way we are cooperating globally to stop people from getting nuclear weapons.
