(ORDO NEWS) — Billionaire and co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates , speaking at the annual Munich Security Conference in Germany, warned that a new pandemic is on the way, for which humanity must have time to prepare.
He noted that to date, the risks of severe illness and death from COVID-19 have “dramatically decreased”, but a future pandemic is almost inevitable.
“We’re going to have another pandemic, ” Gates told CNBC. “Next time it will be a different pathogen.”
Effective fight against COVID-19?
Gates shared that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with UK-based charitable Wellcome Trust to donate $300 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI).
The point of this donation is to help get COVID-19 vaccines to low- and middle-income countries, but Gates is confident that the World Health Organization will miss the goal of vaccinating 70% of the world‘s population by mid-2022.
However, humanity has come close to this indicator because, according to CNBC , 61.9% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of the vaccine.
Gates emphasized that in the future, we need to prepare for pandemics much faster and introduce new vaccines in six months, rather than setting goals for a two-year period.
“The cost of being prepared for the next pandemic isn’t all that great,” Gates said. “This is not like fighting climate change. If we are rational, next time we can end the pandemic much sooner.”
Bill Gates’ words are confirmed by history
Although the words about a new pandemic sound frightening, the course of human history confirms Gates was right.
Diseases come and go, like the 1918 flu pandemic . This is an inevitable phenomenon for which it is necessary to prepare in advance in order to minimize the negative consequences.
In his blog, Gates admitted that he was aware that he appeared in an innumerable number of different conspiracy theories that were somehow connected with COVID-19 (“chipping”, deliberately infecting the population and other nonsense). In the same post, he promoted his new book How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.
“In the book, I offer concrete steps we can take to not only stop future pandemics, but also, in the long term, provide better health care for everyone around the world,” Gates wrote. “Also, I describe… what it’s like to be the subject of conspiracy theories.”
It’s a little worrying that the world’s readiness for the next pandemic falls on the shoulders of a billionaire, and not on the governments of different countries.
It seems that even the most developed states of the Earth not only do not think about future problems, but also cannot effectively solve the existing ones.
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