Bill Gates warns of bio-terrorist attacks and that the world must prepare

Bill Gates said governments must get ready for future pandemics and smallpox terror attacks by investing billions in research and development.

Gates suggested “germ games” could be used to practise how to respond to such events during an interview with Tory MP Jeremy Hunt

He also called for the formation of a new billion-dollar World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Task Force.

Gates said:

It’ll take probably about a billion a year for a pandemic Task Force at the WHO level, which is doing the surveillance and actually doing what I call ‘germ games’ where you practice.

You say, OK, what if a bioterrorist brought smallpox to 10 airports? You know, how would the world respond to that?

There’s naturally-caused epidemics and bioterrorism-caused epidemics that could even be way worse than what we experienced today 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 Task Force.

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.

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.