Years before COVID-19 emerged, Bill Gates warned global leaders about the dangers of highly infectious diseases—but few took action.
For years, Bill Gates has sounded the alarm on the threat of a highly contagious virus. His most notable warning came over five years ago in a TED Talk, where he predicted that the world's biggest killer in coming decades wouldn't be war, but a pandemic.
"Not missiles, but microbes," he stated, criticizing our heavy investments in nuclear deterrence while neglecting health preparedness.
Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft co-founder has invested hundreds of millions over the past decade in accelerating vaccine development and building disease surveillance systems.
He's also personally urged world leaders to prepare, including a 2016 meeting with then-President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower in New York.
Gates has engaged numerous global figures on this issue, yet progress has been limited.
Today, despite his efforts, Gates harbors regrets. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, he expressed feeling "bad" for not "having done more" to alert leaders. "The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage," he said.
Gates called the COVID-19 pandemic the most dramatic event of his lifetime. His foundation—the WHO's largest private donor—plans to invest another $250 million in vaccine development, bolstering health systems in Africa and South Asia, and supplying essential medical equipment.
To date, COVID-19 has infected over 4,222,000 people and claimed more than 288,000 lives, per Johns Hopkins University data.
