Story at a glance
- The Journal reports that Gates explained the potential threat of infectious diseases to presidential candidates in 2016, urging them to prioritize preparedness efforts.
- He made the same plea to Trump during a meeting at Trump Tower.
- The warning from Gates is no surprise, as he’s been warning the world for several years about the threat viruses pose to society.
Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates warned President-elect Trump about the risks of a pandemic to the United States in 2016, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports that Gates explained the potential threat of infectious diseases to presidential candidates in 2016, urging them to prioritize preparedness efforts, and made the same plea to President-elect Trump during a meeting at the Trump Tower in December 2016.
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Trump has been criticized for his administration’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, brushing off concerns about the threat posed by COVID-19 in the U.S.
The warning from Gates is no surprise, as he’s been warning the world for several years about the threat viruses pose to society, most notably, in a 2015 Ted Talk in which Gates said that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than nuclear war.
“If anything kills over 10 million people over the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war — not missiles, but microbes,” Gates said in his Ted Talk.
“Part of the reason is we have invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents, but we’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” he explained. “We’re not ready for the next epidemic.”
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Despite Gates’s many public warnings to lawmakers to make preparing for such a pandemic like COVID-19 a priority, he told The Wall Street Journal he wished he could have done more.
“I feel terrible,” Gates said. “The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage.”
“I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger,” he said.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged more than $250 million in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds are supporting the development of diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.
The coronavirus has infected more than 4.1 million people and killed more than 285,000 worldwide since the outbreak began late last year. In the U.S., cases surpass 1.3 million with more than 80,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
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