Lhe caricature is tempting: seen from a distance, the United States has two faces. On the front side, a president whose unilateralism and taste for provocation alienated the most lenient allies. Hard power in its raw state. On the stack side, the most admired man in the world, according to the British polling institute YouGov which asked the question in 2019 in 41 countries: Bill Gates. Billionaire and philanthropist, the former CEO and co-founder of Microsoft has no political responsibility. But if someone was needed to embody American soft power in 2020, it would be him.
Nobody in the world spends more, literally and figuratively, on public health than this 64-year-old man, at the head of the foundation to which he gave 36 billion dollars (32.7 billion euros ) of his personal fortune.
In twenty years, he has made it, with his wife Melinda and another famous billionaire-philanthropist, Warren Buffett, the largest private charity on the planet. Today, the Gates Foundation is a major international player in the fields of health and development.
When Bill Gates Calls, World Leaders Pick Up the Phone
As Donald Trump suspends the United States' contribution to the World Health Organization (WHO) during a pandemic, Bill Gates redirects all of his foundation's work to the fight against coronavirus and adds to it $ 305 million. It spurs research on vaccines and treatments, mobilizes factories so that they are ready to manufacture them, when the time comes, worldwide, because "We have never produced 7 billion vaccines".
While the White House, supposed to prepare for the G7 summit in June, is still not taking the slightest initiative, Bill Gates, for his part, discreetly agitates governments to make them adopt a common agenda for combating the coronavirus. When Bill Gates calls, leaders around the world pick up the phone – including at the Elysee Palace.
And all of this irritates. Within weeks, he became the epicenter of the vaccine and containment revolt. Conspiracists of all stripes are unleashed against him. According to Yahoo News and YouGov, 44% of American Republican voters believe he wants to use the Covid-19 vaccine to implant geolocation chips on their bodies.
Governments taken aback
Who's Afraid of Bill Gates? The Covid-19 pandemic provided him with a global forum which he would have done well. This platform, he had seized it for several years, while preaching, it must be recognized, in a vacuum: the premonitory video of his Ted Talk of 2015, the public intervention in which he warns that humanity s exposed to epidemics far more devastating than that of Ebola the previous year, went on loop during confinement – a little late.
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