Considering the pandemic as war, billionaire Bill Gates proposed to set up a “quick response team” worldwide

Billionaire Bill Gates recently outlined an ambitious plan to prevent the next pandemic. In particular, he called for the construction of a large-scale global warning and testing system, forming a “quick response” team of 3,000 people and several tens of billions of dollars to invest in this each year.

“To prevent last year’s disaster from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be as important as the way we view the threat of war,” Bloomberg quoted Bill Gates in his annual Bill & Melinda Gates letter. Foundation January 27. “The world has not been prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic. I think the next time will be different.”

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is founded and run by the billionaire couple Bill Gates with a focus on global health issues. In the letter, Gates outlined a strategy to prevent and respond to the next public health crisis, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic that infected more than 100 million people and remained unpredictable. Countries, including mainly rich ones, are urgently deploying vaccinations to end this pandemic.

“As the next pandemic hits, I hope to see ‘large scale diagnostic platforms’ that can test up to 20% of the global population each week,” Gates said. “The total cost of protecting the world from the next pandemic sounds big, but is nowhere compared to the $ 28,000 billion damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.”

“The world needs to spend billions of dollars to avoid losses of trillions of dollars,” said the co-founder of Microsoft.

He said that Covid-19 vaccines with high efficiency mRNA technology now could pave the way for great strides in vaccine development in the next five years. This technology shows the possibility that one day the world will develop vaccines to prevent diseases like HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. To date, the Gates Foundation has invested $ 1.75 billion in activities in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, according to Melinda Gates, one of the biggest concerns right now is the risk of “unequal immunity,” when only the rich have access to the vaccines.

“Until vaccines are given to everyone, new diseases will continue to arise,” she said. “These diseases will grow and spread. Schools and offices will have to close again. This circle of inequality will continue.”