Bill Gates Joins Two Major AI Partnerships to Develop Vaccines and Eliminate Respiratory Illnesses

The Gates Foundation announced a multi-year partnership with artificial intelligence company Anthropic, committing $200 million over four years to develop AI tools for global health, education, and agriculture. Bill Gates has faced criticism for his philanthropic efforts to assist in global health ventures, including his pandemic exercise a month before the COVID-19 virus emerged in Wuhan, China, and his ability to become one of the largest unelected and unappointed health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The announcement of his partnership with Anthropic happened in May, and now a new philanthropic effort has been announced with $500 million in seed money from Anthropic, OpenAI Foundation, the payment company Stripe, and venture capitalists, including Gates. This effort aims to eradicate respiratory viruses, including the common cold, influenza, and coronaviruses. The project is called Intercept.

“We treat respiratory infections as a minor nuisance, but that’s really not the case,” wrote Nan Ransohoff, co-head of Intercept and head of Public Goods at Stripe, on a web forum. “Most of us will spend 5% of our lives (!) sick from these viruses; they kill 1M people a year, cost $600B annually in productivity, and periodically threaten civilization through pandemics,” she wrote.

Intercept will focus on broad-spectrum preventatives (BSP) and air-cleaning technologies. BSPs include vaccines, nasal drops, and pills to reduce “rhinoviruses, influenza, coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses simultaneously” by 75%, with a stated goal of 60% uptake. Some of the approaches the project hopes to focus on include adaptive immunity with CD8 T cells and inhibition of the viral lifecycle with small interfering RNA or siRNA vaccines.

Intercept also intends to use air cleaning technologies, including filtration, “far-UVC” antimicrobial light, and antimicrobial vapors like triethylene glycol and propylene glycol

On the list of BSPs, the Intercept says it intends to explore host-directed antivirals as a solution. The blog post states, “Host-directed antivirals work by acting on human targets that viruses depend on to enter or replicate inside cells.” The authors add that one of the main challenges to this is “finding ways to target them safely without causing harmful side effects.”

These kinds of therapies have been tested for Tuberculosis, but not for anything as mild as the common cold or influenza. In 2015, Researcher David Tobin wrote, “In contrast to targeting bacteria directly, whole-animal, wholesale inhibition of host proteins may lead to other consequences. Host proteins may also be used in other contexts, including other organs and other cell types not directly related to mycobacterial infection. Thus, host targeting may have an increased risk for side effects on patients.”

These therapies inhibit human proteins that are useful throughout the body, such as the liver, kidney, and brain. The use of host-directed antivirals could cause unintended consequences, including immunosuppression according to Tobin.

Intercept, along with the AI companies and funding from Gates, is exploring the use of these types of therapies and vaccines to tackle the common cold and influenza. Most people recover from the common cold within seven days, and most recover from the flu within a few days to two weeks without any long-term harm. Elderly people and individuals with pre-existing conditions or comorbidities are more likely to have worse outcomes from these respiratory illnesses. The project intends to have a 60% uptake rate across the board, regardless of the health or age of the people in the population.

The HighWire has reported on many concerns related to AI safety, rogue actors, and the potential for the technology to act independently. Five Eyes Cyber Security Agencies have raised an alarm that the world is months away from AI threats exceeding defensive capabilities. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Co-founder Jack Clark have both raised concerns that the development of AI tech has the potential to cause serious harm, potentially as serious as “killing everyone on the planet.”

Bill Gates issued his own warning earlier this year while also noting that he sees several ways that AI technology can improve society. Gates wrote that his greatest concern regarding AI is that a non-government group will use the technology to design a bioterrorism weapon. He compared his current warning to a 2015 TED Talk in which he said the world was not prepared for a pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic immediately spawned concerns that it emerged as a bioterrorism weapon, as the primary narrative took hold that the virus emerged at a wet market in Wuhan. Dr. Anthony Fauci was later implicated for his role in approving coronavirus gain-of-function research at the Wuhan laboratory, which is now considered to be the likely source of the COVID-19 virus by intelligence agencies. The intelligence community (IC) initially supported the wet market theory, and recent revelations show that Dr. Fauci was involved in those discussions, which is a conflict of interest.

While Dr. Fauci is scheduled to speak before a Senate hearing later this month, his advisor David Morens has already been indicted on charges related to a cover-up. There is a continued discussion on whether the COVID-19 pandemic could be a catalyst or complication for future bioterrorism events.

The FDA acknowledged in December that healthy children who had an extremely low risk of harm from the COVID-19 virus died from the COVID-19 vaccine. AI technology is moving forward rapidly while all industry leaders are warning of potential harms. Meanwhile, Gates and the AI companies are creating partnerships to create vaccines and new products intended to eliminate respiratory viruses altogether.