Computer creator and philanthropist Bill Gates knew that the biggest killer in the world wouldn't be a war but a pandemic. Now he regrets not sounding the alarm loudly enough.
The Wall Street Journal reported that five years ago, Gates warned that we should be planning for a pandemic. He even spent hundreds of millions of dollars to find ways to develop vaccines faster. “What’s to stop some form of SARS showing up?”
“The world as a whole doesn’t have the preparedness for epidemics,” Gates told the Journal in a Nov. 2014 interview.
"I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger,” Gates said, looking back. “I feel terrible. The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage.”
Writing for the New England Journal of Medicine in February, Gates sounded the alarm, but few politicians or White House advisers are avid readers of the Journal.
“COVID-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about,” he wrote.
“An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades,” he continued.
The coronavirus, Gates said, is “the most dramatic thing ever in my lifetime by a lot.” The Gates Foundation work to help eradicate polio and vaccinate children in low-income countries has been interrupted, but not unfunded.
The foundation has invested $305 million in the search for the COVID-19 vaccine and any remedies. Gates said he anticipates they'll spend more.
“In no way was I a lone voice,” Gates said. “The one thing that’s unique about my voice, though, is that I haven’t spent my life in infectious diseases.”
His warnings were heeded by the previous White House administration, which ran a simulation, crafted a 69-page pandemic plan, created a national security office to deal with health concerns and put CDC staffers on the ground at the U.S. Embassy in China to keep an eye on any illnesses developing on the other side of the globe. All of those efforts were either ignored or disbanded by the Trump administration.
“I chose, when I met with people all the way up to the top, in Europe, in the U.S., around the world, to talk about this pandemic risk,” he said.
But solving a crisis isn't up to the wealthy citizens of the world, he explained.
“I’m putting hundreds of millions of the foundation’s money into this,” said Gates.“But it’s really a governmental thing, just like the defense budget is there to help with an outbreak of war.’”
When outreach internationally didn't work -- he focused in the U.S.
“Whenever I asked about respiratory viruses, like how important are schools and if you do shutdowns, how much can you drop the transmission, and even…do masks actually help or not?” he said. No one could answer.
“I wish the warnings that I and other people gave had led to more coordinated global action,” he said.