Billionaire Bill Gates gave an interview in which he shared his prediction about life after the pandemic. The philanthropist is rather pessimistic: according to him, COVID-19 is far from the worst thing that humanity could face. What threats does Gates warn about?
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was interviewed by Veritasium YouTube owner Derek Mueller, in which he detailed that prophetic 2015 TED Talks when the philanthropist actually predicted the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as shared his predictions about new threats that may face. planet in the near future.
Six years ago, Gates, speaking at a conference, said: "If something kills 10 million people in the next few decades, it will be a highly contagious virus, not a war." Now, recalling his speech, the billionaire regrets that he "was not convincing enough" for the world to be able to prepare for the current pandemic.
According to Gates, there are a large number of respiratory viruses that are highly contagious, and from time to time they cause global epidemics in the world, as was the case, for example, with the Spanish flu, so there was nothing revolutionary in his prediction. However, pandemics do not happen often enough to convince people to invest in protection against them.
“We are lulling with a sense of false security, we do not think that this will happen in the next ten years, so we do not consider it necessary to invest in it,” the billionaire said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated the importance of such investments.
Derek Müller suggested that humanity has learned its lesson with the new coronavirus, and therefore will be more prepared for the next outbreak of the infectious disease. However, he was interested in the question of what new threats with destructive consequences the world might face in the near future.
“One of them is climate change. Every year it will lead to a much higher number of victims than in the entire current pandemic, ”warned Gates.
Another challenge for which the world is not yet ready, according to the billionaire, is bioterrorism.
“Anyone who wants to cause damage can create a virus artificially, which increases the chances of encountering it than in a natural pandemic,” said the philanthropist.
Vivek Wadhwa, a technical expert and assistant professor at the College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, said earlier about the real threat of bioterrorism, reports Business Insider. In his essay on this issue, Wadhwa points out the high likelihood of an artificial pandemic due to the emergence of disruptive and inexpensive technologies in the field of genetic engineering.
According to the expert, COVID-19 did not appear in the laboratory, but the next pandemic "may well be" a consequence of the cultivation of artificial pathogens. Wadhwa added that the new coronavirus should be considered a "dress rehearsal" before the spread of infections that will be deliberately created by humans in order to use them against the population.
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