Research funding needed to prepare for future pandemic, bioterrorism -Bill Gates

The crisis of Covid pandemic calls for the need to prepare for future pandemic and bioterrorism attacks, Bill Gates has said.

The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates revealed that billions in research and development funding will go a long way to ensure pandemic preparedness. He made this known at a Policy Exchange interview with the chair of the Health Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt.

“I’m hoping in five years, I can write a book called, ‘We ARE ready for the next pandemic’, but it’ll take tens of billions in R&D – the US and the UK will be part of that”, Gates said, “and probably about a billion a year for a pandemic task force at the WHO [World Health Organization] level”

According to him, the WHO task force would carry out “germ games” likened to surveillance across the country. This ‘germ games’ could prepare nations for bio-terrorism such as smallpox attacks on airports.

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“There’s naturally caused epidemics and bioterrorism-caused epidemics that could even be way worse than what we experienced today,” he said. “And yet the advances in medical science should give us tools that, you know, we could do dramatically better. So you’d think this would be a priority. The next year will be where those allocations have to get made, including this global pandemic taskforce.”

The world’s fourth richest man, who was also at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, expressed concern over the weaknesses exposed by the rapid spread of Covid around the world, adding, that shared research funding will help to create new ways of doing vaccines.

“The nice thing is a lot of the R&D we need to do to be ready for the next pandemic are things like making vaccines cheap, having big factories, eradicating the flu, getting rid of the common cold, making vaccines just a little patch you put on your arm, [are] things that will be incredibly beneficial even in the years when we don’t have pandemics.”

“Along with the climate message and the ongoing fight against diseases of the poor, pandemic preparedness is something I’ll be talking about a lot.

“And I think it’ll find fertile ground because, you know, we lost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. And citizens expect their governments not to let that happen again.”

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