‘Germ attack’ Bill Gates sends terrifying warning over ‘bioterrorist smallpox’ outbreak

Bill Gates describes the UK as 'exemplary' in fighting climate change

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The world’s fourth-richest man said that to avoid this type of situation, we would need “tens of billions” to be spent in research and development as a preventative measure. And he said Governments need to start preparing right now if they are to avoid these “germ attacks”. He warned that these attacks could have an outcome “way worse” than the pandemic we see today.

Mr Gates said: “There are naturally-caused epidemics and bioterrorism-caused epidemics that could even be way worse than what we experienced today and yet, the advances in medical science should give us tools that, you know, we could do dramatically better.”

The comments came as the multi-billionaire had a sit-down interview with the chair of the Health Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt, for the think tank Policy Exchange.

But Mr Gates also offered solutions to avoid the catastrophe.

One suggestion from Mr Gates was to have a new billion-dollar World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Task Forced set up.

He said: “It’ll take probably about a billion a year for a pandemic Task Force at the WHO level, which is doing the surveillance and actually doing what I call ‘germ games’ where you practice.

“You say, OK, what if a bioterrorist brought smallpox to 10 airports? You know, how would the world respond to that?

“You’d think this would be a priority. The next year will be where those allocations have to get made, including this global Pandemic Task Force.”

And Mr Gates also said that out of the huge R&D spending that will be needed to avoid the catastrophic crisis, exciting new innovations could come about.

He added: “I’m hoping in five years, I can write a book called, ‘We ARE ready for the next pandemic’, but it’ll take tens of billions in R&D – the US and the UK will be part of that.

“The nice thing is a lot of the R&D we need to do to be ready for the next pandemic are things like making vaccines cheap, having big factories, eradicating the flu, getting rid of the common cold, making vaccines just a little patch you put on your arm, things that will be incredibly beneficial even in the years when we don’t have pandemics.”

Mr Gates also warned back in 2014 that the world would not be ready for a pandemic when he spoke at a Ted Talk.

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He warned: “There’s no need to panic … but we need to get going.”

“If anything kills over 10,000 people in the next few decades it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war, not missiles but microbes.

“We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic, we’re not ready for the next epidemic.”

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