Bill Gates says ‘rich’ countries may return to normal in 2021 after vaccine is approved

Leading vaccines in the race to get approved in the US and other western countries are those developed by Pfizer/BioNTech and AstraZeneca/Oxford University.

Gates has however warned that the success of these trials is not guaranteed.

The Microsoft founder, 64, has also warned governments to begin preparing ways to reduce the hesitance of the public to a vaccine as politics has made people distrustful of vaccines.

He made these statements during an interview with the Wall Street Journal, slamming the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for talking about the use of plasma as a COVID-19 vaccine.

He said: “The FDA did embarrass itself pretty badly with the plasma announcement, where they made claims that were just completely wrong. They put a lot of praise of political figures into it so they haven’t been as strong as you would expect.  

“With the vaccine and the idea of the expert panel and the professional team, I do think this is the gold standard that both the US and the world will want to look to before you want to give the vaccine out to millions of people

“We still don’t know whether these vaccines will succeed. Now the capacity will take time to ramp up. And so the allocation within the U.S., and between the U.S. and other countries will be a very top point of contention. 

“If you were going for an elimination where we don’t have any more transmission, that will take two to three years,’ he continued.

“In the rich countries, however, if you really in the first months of next year have the vaccine and they’re fairly effective at transmission blocking, then by late next year you could have things going back pretty much to normal, that’s the best case.”