Bill Gates said during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that the United States has a “chance of a natural pandemic” during President Donald Trump’s second term.
“The chance of a natural pandemic in the next four years is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent,” Gates told WSJ’s editor-in-chief Emma Tucker. “And it’d be nice to think we’re actually more ready for that than we were last time, but so far we’re not.”
“People — rather than having a consensus about what tools are missing — are mostly still replaying the various mistakes that were made,” he added. “I wouldn’t say that we’re as far along as you’d expect after trillions of dollars and millions of lives have been lost.”
The Microsoft founder previously proposed a ‘Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM)’ network in a 2022 TED Talk. “This group is full-time. Their only priority is pandemic prevention. It’s made up of a diverse set of specialists with a lot of different realms of expertise: epidemiologists, data scientists, logistics experts,” he said at the time. “And it’s not just scientific and medical knowledge. They also have to have communication and diplomacy skills. The cost of this team is significant. It’s over a billion a year to support the 3,000 people who would be on this team. And its mission is to stop outbreaks before they become pandemics. The work would be coordinated by the WHO. They’d be present in many locations around the world, stationed in public health agencies.”
He further wrote in a 2023 opinion piece for The New York Times that an “Emergency Corps must build on existing networks of experts and be led by people like the heads of national public health agencies and their leads for epidemic response.”
Under the direction of new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) head John Ratcliffe, the agency released an assessment indicating that a laboratory origin is the most likely explanation for the emergence of COVID-19. A Chinese embassy spokesperson condemned the report, saying, “The source of the virus is a complex scientific issue, and scientists and experts should find the answer through rigorous and meticulous scientific research, rather than being judged by politicians.”
