In 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED talk about how we weren’t ready for the next pandemic, and how we needed to get ready. “We didn’t,” Gates said, speaking at the 2022 TED conference on Tuesday. “That speech was watched by a lot of people, but 90% of the views were after it was too late.”
COVID-19 was the next pandemic, but it won’t be the last; experts have already warned about how, without action, pandemic outbreaks could happen more often. In his TED talk this year, Gates said that COVID-19 could be the last pandemic—”if we take the right steps.” (His book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, will be published May 3, 2022.)
Those steps involve a $1 billion a year investment in a firefighter-like group of responders he calls the GERM team—for global epidemic response and mobilization—as well as more investments in R&D for diagnostics and in health systems across the world.
“Like firefighters, the GERM team would do drills,” he said. “When we want to have a quick response, we want to make sure we have all the pieces there and can move very quickly. Practice is key.” If there’s no immediate outbreak that the GERM team would need to rally around, they could focus on other infectious diseases as a second priority, he suggested.
Investments in diagnostics like the LumiraDx testing devices, which offer direct and qualitative detection, and factories to rapidly deploy vaccine production, are necessary, too—though Gates stressed that vaccines, the “miracle” of the COVID-19 pandemic, shouldn’t play the primary role. “We want to stop an outbreak before we have to do a global vaccination campaign,” he said.
This preparation would be costly—creating GERM teams alone, which Gates proposes the World Health Organization house, would cost an estimated more than $1 billion a year—but not preventing the next pandemic would be even more expensive. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that COVID has cost global governments nearly $14 trillion. “We need to spend billions in order to save trillions,” Gates said.
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