Bill Gates issued a warning during his visit to Australia about the impending threat of another pandemic, one that could be much more devastating than Covid and could be man-made, Daily Mail reported.
On Monday, Microsoft founder Bill Gates discussed global health, pandemic preparedness, food security, and ‘climate change’ in an in-depth interview with Lowy Institute Executive Director Dr. Michael Fullilove.
Gates urged that world leaders must put aside their differences and work together to prepare for the next epidemic.
While Gates claims that no country did the right thing in its response to the Covid pandemic, he praised Australia and seven other countries that did “population scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies.”
“So nobody, I would say, gets an A on this one. Sadly, epidemics come along so rarely that it’s easy to be incompetent.”
“You know, earthquakes, fires, they come more often, storms. And so governments, you know, they’re pretty good on fires. You know, there hasn’t been a 5000-death fire in the world for a long, long time. Epidemics, hopefully, this will get us to take them seriously, at least for the next 20 or 30 years,” he said.
“With the pandemic, we were foolish not to have the tools, the practice, and global capacity to be on standby like we do with fire or earthquakes.”
“So we need to be doing, every five years, a really comprehensive exercise at both country and regional level of pandemic preparedness,” said Gates. “And you need a global group that’s kind of scoring everybody. And saying, hey, if you’re not participating in this, you could be the source of the next pandemic. And that’s bad for the entire world. This is like a fire that goes global.”
During the discussion, Bill Gates praised human innovation.
“The amount of IQ in the world that’s being educated, the quality of the tools we have to drive forward, or innovation, whether it’s in health or energy or education, those are fantastic things.”
Gates cautioned that this might be exploited by those who wish to destroy the world, suggesting that with great minds comes a downside.
“Some of the tools of biology could actually be used by a bioterrorist,” Gates said.
“Risk comes from two sources. One is nature, which generally are diseases of animals, zoonosis that comes across and infects humans, in this case, a bat virus. It’s one of the four big families of viruses that we know its receptors can change, that they attach to the human lung and become human respiratory disease. And that’s the main thing to worry about is respiratory disease, because you get very fast human-to-human spread.”
Gates emphasized that countries should have standby tools, both antivirals and vaccines, that can fight infections.
“So there’s a class that’s got measles in it, a class of flu, a class of coronavirus, and a fourth class, all of which we need to have standby tools, both antivirals and vaccines that can deal with those. It’s very doable. So on the tool’s front, we can be far more prepared,” Gates said.
Gates also called for surveillance to track and monitor people.
“We see the greatest progress when governments, the private sector, and local communities collaborate in global health programs,” said Bill Gates, co-chair. “The commitment this week to combat preventable diseases and save millions more lives through the Global Fund replenishment is a great step forward in getting back on track to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”
Even Tony Blair, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, has advocated for the development of “national digital infrastructure” to facilitate the distribution of new vaccines and to determine who is vaccinated or who is not for future pandemics during the WEF summit at Davos, Switzerland.
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