Bill Gates warns about next pandemic — Analysis

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates has warned the next pandemic may arise from a “We already have knowledge about viruses,” in an interview with El Diario on Sunday. In an interview with El Diario on Sunday, he said that 50% of the time there will be a new plague within twenty years. In addition to a known virus, the next pandemic could be a human-made bioterror agent, or “Something that leaps from the natural world” due to climate change, he said. Gates’ philanthropic efforts focus primarily on vaccination and climate change.

Gates suggested in his book that to prevent another pandemic from happening, nations must invest billions of dollars researching possible pathogens. This was because they need to create a 3,000 strong team of specialists. The task force, titled with the clever acronym GERM (Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization), would be funded via the World Health Organization, which would require an extra $1 billion per year – a 25% budgetary increase – so that it can be constantly on the lookout for potential outbreaks.

While the Covid-fatigued media has seized on monkeypox as the next killer plague du jour, Gates dismissed its potential to destroy humanity, noting “It is unlikely that there will be any chance” it will become “The next pandemic.” However, he praised the coverage, suggesting that “if it weren’t for the coronavirus pandemic, monkeypox wouldn’t even be in the news. And that’s good.”

Indeed, Gates didn’t completely shut out the possibility of monkeypox mutating to become something nastier, noting that it was necessary to maintain alertness because hundreds of cases of the virus had surfaced in Europe, where it is not normally found. People who have traveled to West Africa for the disease, monkeypox, were among those that developed clusters this year. These cases almost exclusively occurred in bisexual and gay men.

The WHO sent mixed messages regarding monkeypox at its emergency meeting. The agency’s Epidemic and Pandemic Preparedness and Prevention chief Sylvie Briand said on Friday that the diagnosed cases were just “the tip of the iceberg” and that “many more cases” were lurking “undetected in communities,” at the same time reassuring people that “this is not a disease the general public should be worried about” because it doesn’t “Spread fast” like Covid-19.

The software tycoon turned vaccine magnate warned earlier this month that the novel coronavirus wasn’t through with humanity just yet, suggesting the world was “There is still a risk that this pandemic could generate a new variant, even more deadly and transmissive..”

There was “way above a 5% risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it,” he said.

Most recently, Covid-19’s omicron variant was much less fatal than previous pandemics. Some even declared the pandemic over, while others acknowledged that it had reached an endemic level, similar to the flu.

While Gates has no medical training or college degree, his 2015 prediction that the world was “Are you ready for the next inevitable pandemic?” has since been hailed as prophetic by media outlets, many of which are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.