Bill Gates has warned of bioterrorist attacks and urged international authorities, including the World Health Organization, to prepare by engaging in “germ games.”
Gates issued the warning on Wednesday during a Policy Exchange discussion with Jeremy Hunt, the chairman of the UK Health Select Committee.
In a new interview, Gates urged world governments to invest billions in R&D to prepare for future pandemics and potential smallpox terror attacks, according to Sky News.
Bill Gates urges to practice ‘Germ Games’, warned of bioterrorist attacks
Bill Gates suggested that “germ games” could be used to practice and prepare for such events.
During the discussion, he also called for the creation of a new billion-dollar Pandemic Task Force led by the World Health Organization.
“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,” he said.
“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.”
He claims that, while countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States will have to spend billions of dollars, the end result could be the abolition of everything from the flu to the common cold.
He continued: “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.”
Gates stated that pandemic preparations will be a major focus of his future work.
“So 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.”
Video clip of the interview of Bill Gates with Jeremy Hunt
Bill Gates was one of the few who warned far in advance we weren’t ready for a pandemic so have we learned or will we still end up fighting the last war? Sobering assessment in my @policyexchange interview pic.twitter.com/gjHlAsgmmG
— Jeremy Hunt (@Jeremy_Hunt) November 4, 2021
