Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates again warned about the two more disasters that could devastate the entire globe.
Bill Gates spoke in a TED Talk in 2015 titled “The next outbreak? We’re not ready” is being shared widely online in recent weeks given the impact of COVID-19 around the world.
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war,” Gates said during the Ted Talk. “Not missiles, but microbes.”
Two years later, he said the same thing at an event in Davos.
Gates, who had predicted the outbreak of a pandemic like COVID-19 in 2015, told Derek Muller, who runs the popular YouTube channel “Veritasium”, over a video call that ‘climate change’ and ‘bio-terrorism’ are two disasters that human beings are not prepared for.
Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Seattle last month, Gates said the impact of COVID-19 could be “very, very dramatic,” particularly if it spreads to areas like sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia.
Speaking on bio-terrorism, Gates said that an individual could now easily engineer a deadly virus, and the possibility of encountering such viruses is more than any naturally-caused epidemics like the COVID-19.
He further said that if a disaster like that strikes, human-kind is possibly looking towards a death toll that is greater than the current pandemic. And since it’s man-made it has a chance of happening every year.
On the COVID-19 crisis, he said that ‘there is no good feeling’ with something like that. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed $100 million to fighting coronavirus, as part of its broader efforts in global health.
“Respiratory diseases are very scary because you’re still walking around on a plane, a bus when you’re infectious. Unlike some other diseases like ebola where you are mostly in a hospital bed by the time viral load infects other people,” Gates had said.
In 2015, Bill Gates gave a Ted Talk stating that a highly infectious virus will ravage mankind in the near future. Gates predicted this soon after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014.
“The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease, an especially virulent flu, for example, that infects large numbers of people very quickly.” Gates had said in the interview.
“Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” he added.
