It has been a century since the Spanish Flu rocked the planet at the end of WWI. Are we overdue for another round of fast-acting plague? Bill Gates thinks we should be concerned.
Bill Gates thinks a coming disease could kill 30 million people within 6 months — and says we should prepare for it as we do for war
“If there’s one thing that we know from history, it’s that a deadly new disease will arise and spread around the globe.
That could happen easily within the next decade. And as Bill Gates told listeners on Friday at a discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, we’re not ready.
Gates acknowledged that he’s usually the optimist in the room, reminding people that we’re lifting children out of poverty around the globe and getting better at eliminating diseases like polio and malaria.
But “there’s one area though where the world isn’t making much progress,” Gates said, “and that’s pandemic preparedness.”
Gates emphasized: “The world should prepare as it does for war.”
“The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise. New pathogens emerge all the time as the world population increases and humanity encroaches on wild environments. It’s becoming easier and easier for individual people or small groups to create weaponized diseases that could spread like wildfire around the globe.
According to Gates, a small non-state actor could build an even deadlier form of smallpox in a lab….”
[FWIW, Nostradamus prophecies of WWIII describe a “plague through false dust” and end times Bible prophecies like Revelation 6:8 suggest plague could kill up to a quarter of humanity – almost two billion people.]
“…And in our interconnected world, people are always hopping on planes, crossing from cities on one continent to those on another in a matter of hours.
Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling that found that a new flu like the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic would now most likely kill 30 million people within six months.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9afTl9z5JHQ&w=866&h=487]
And the disease that next takes us by surprise is likely to be one we see for the first time at the start of an outbreak.”
“If you were to tell the world’s governments that weapons that could kill 30 million people were under construction right now, there’d be a sense of urgency about preparing for the threat, Gates said.”
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