June 16, 2020
Bloomberg Markets and Finance
William Haseltine, who designed the strategy to develop the first treatment for HIV/AIDS and is now chair and president of consulting group ACCESS Health International
02:34
We are going back to a period at the beginning of my life, when antibiotics were just coming in–at the end of WWII–for civilian use. Penicillin had been discovered.
But before that, when we were building our railroads, when we were building our cities, we lived with the possibility that tomorrow will not come. Everybody knew that an infection could spell death. We are back to that era.
It’s something that many of us predicted: “There would come a time, there would come a disease that would take us back to the pre-antibiotic days.”
The world doesn’t end. Your world may end … but mankind goes on. We built the world at a time before vaccines and antibiotics. So we will prevail. But we will pay a price.
franzcalvo 