Bill Gates: It's Not Too Soon To Start Thinking About the Next Pandemic

Bill Gates and Melinda Gates write in their annual letter, shared by reader cusco: To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war. The world needs to double down on investments in R & D and organizations like CEPI that have proven invaluable with COVID-19. We also need to build brand-new capabilities that don't exist yet. Stopping the next pandemic will require spending tens of billions of dollars per year -- a big investment, but remember that the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to cost the world $28 trillion. The world needs to spend billions to save trillions (and prevent millions of deaths). I think of this as the best and most cost-efficient insurance policy the world could buy.

The bulk of this investment needs to come from rich countries. Low- and middle-income countries and foundations like ours have a role to play, but governments from high-income nations need to lead the charge here because the benefits for them are so huge. If you live in a rich country, it's in your best interest for your government to go big on pandemic preparedness around the world. Melinda wrote that COVID-19 anywhere is threat to health everywhere; the same is true of the next potential pandemic. The tools and systems created to stop pathogens in their tracks need to span the globe, including in low- and middle-income countries. To start, governments need to continue investing in the scientific tools that are getting us through this current pandemic -- even after COVID-19 is behind us. New breakthroughs will give us a leg up the next time a new disease emerges. It took months to get enough testing capacity for COVID-19 in the United States. But it's possible to build up diagnostics that can be deployed very quickly. By the next pandemic, I'm hopeful we'll have what I call mega-diagnostic platforms, which could test as much as 20 percent of the global population every week.

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