What makes him unique is that Bill Gates is actually trying.
As far as I can tell, no one else with billions of dollars is actually trying to help as best they can. Those same effective altruists are full of detailed thoughts, but aside from shamefully deplatforming Robin Hanson it’s been a long time since I’ve heard about them making a serious attempt to do anything.
I agree with you about the Hanson thing, but the EA movement did its best to shift as much funding as was practical towards coronavirus related causes. This page covers Givewell’s efforts, this covers the career and contribution advice of 80k hours. I know more than a few EA types who dropped whatever they were doing in March to try and focus on coronavirus modelling—for example, FHI’s Epidemic Forecasting project.
Bill Gates didn’t. He’s out there doing the best he knows how to do.
Thus, we should quote Theodore Roosevelt, and first and foremost applaud him and learn from him.
I found the entire podcast to be quite astounding, especially the part where Gates explained how he had to sit down and patiently listen to Trump saying vaccines didn’t work. When I consider how much of America apparently hates him despite all this, it couldn’t help but remind me of a certain quote.
We know from the ONS that the total number of patients ever admitted to hospital with coronavirus on July 22nd was 131,412. That number is probably pretty close to accurate—even during the worst of the epidemic the UK was testing more or less every hospital patient with coronavirus symptoms. The estimated number of people ever infected on July 22nd by c19pro was 5751036
I agree with you about the Hanson thing, but the EA movement did its best to shift as much funding as was practical towards coronavirus related causes. This page covers Givewell’s efforts, this covers the career and contribution advice of 80k hours. I know more than a few EA types who dropped whatever they were doing in March to try and focus on coronavirus modelling—for example, FHI’s Epidemic Forecasting project.
I found the entire podcast to be quite astounding, especially the part where Gates explained how he had to sit down and patiently listen to Trump saying vaccines didn’t work. When I consider how much of America apparently hates him despite all this, it couldn’t help but remind me of a certain quote.
As to your discussion about Hospitalization rates—it’s interesting to note how our picture of the overall hospitalization rate has evolved over time, from estimating near 20% to as low as 2%. I wrote a long comment with an estimation of what it might be for the UK, with this conclusion -