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Prepare
Asked Bill Gates What’s. Derek: So how did it feel to make this prediction and then have the world essentially not listen and not prepare? Bill Gates: Asked Bill Gates What’s.
Well there’s no good feeling that comes on something like this saying i told you so If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, Asked Bill Gates What’s
it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. You know I just think back and could I have been more persuasive? We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic. Derek: How did you make such a prescient prediction?
How did you know this was going to happen?
BG: Well there’s a number of respiratory viruses and from time to time one will come along that’s very transmissive and causes some level of fatalities.
when his foundation’s annual letter came out I’ll link to it in the description and we talked about lots of things including conspiracy theories and misinformation but about the pandemic.
I wanted to know if so many people could see this coming and the costs of prevention were relatively small then why wasn’t more done about it?
BG: Well there’s some risks like earthquakes where we see small earthquakes all the time. Or you know the history of war or fire or hurricanes so you don’t forget.
These pandemics only come along so irregularly that being lulled into a sense of security where it probably won’t be a problem in the next few years, why should we put money into that?
What is the one that we’re not prepared for? BG: Well I’d point out two: One is climate change. Every year that would be a death toll even greater than we’ve had in this pandemic.
Pandemics
Also, related to pandemics is something people don’t like to talk about much which is bioterrorism, that somebody.
Who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus and so that means the cost the chance of running into this is more than just the naturally cost epidemics like the current one.
Derek: It feels to me like there’s something similar about pandemics and you know climate change or like asteroid impact, which is that you know they’re not very tangible but you could do a little bit.
I don’t know it seems like humans are not very good at those sorts of problems.
BG: Well my favorite writer, Vaclav Smil, you know wrote about all the potential kinds of disasters like you know the risk of an asteroid, the risk of a you know yellowstone-like eruption and in fact he showed.
That pandemics were significantly the biggest thing other than a human-caused nuclear war that we needed to be more prepared for Derek.
So what changes do we put in place to be readier for the next one and is it possible that covid-19 could be the last global pandemic?
BG: Well certainly there will be more pandemics. The ways that humans interact with other species, these viruses are coming across a species barrier whether.
We could increase our preparedness so we never have a death toll uh anywhere near what we have today. You know pandemics can be worse in terms of the fatalities. Smallpox was a over 30 per cent fatality.
You know so a little bit we were lucky that the fatality here is not not super high but we can nip it in the bud it’ll still get to a lot of countries but.
Two Sections
That we didn’t have that we should have going forward? BG: I would divide it into two sections: There’s the field based activity and the R&D activity.
In R&D we need to mature mRNA so we can make it even faster and have factories all over the world, have it be cheap and thermal stable.
There’s a lot that can go into therapeutics including antibodies. On diagnostics having.
The ability to give 10 million PCR tests a day. Then in terms of the field we need a lot of diagnostic machines all over the world. We need a team of epidemiologists. So the investments are about equal between R&D and the the field-based group and information that should beconstantly flowing.
If you have any thoughts about the current state of it you know how do we deal with this? BG: Well the internet has done something fantastic which is if you want to learn you know the people.
Who watch you are you know getting an opportunity to understand science and what’s going on and that just wasn’t there uh and so for a lot of people they’re so much more informed.
