Bill Gates wants a pandemic fire squad

Video Transcript:

We all want to return to the way things were before COVID-19. But there's one area where I hope we never go back, our complacency about pandemics. We can get ahead of infectious disease outbreaks. By the next pandemic, I believe we can have what I call megatesting diagnostic platforms. They can be deployed quickly, cost very little, and tasked 20% of the entire population every week. We also want to get treatments out far faster next time. One of the most promising is monoplone antibodies. These manufacturing antibodies grab onto the virus and disable it just like your immune system and can reduce death rates by as much as 80%. I also think that we'll develop new vaccines quickly. In large part, due to this new mRNA platform, mRNA will become faster to develop, easier to store and lower costs. That's a huge breakthrough. To stop future pandemics quickly, we need to be able to spot disease outbreaks as soon as they happen anywhere in the world. And that requires a global alert system. If there turns out to be some new infectious pathogen, then we need a group of infectious disease responders to spring into action. Think of these as like pandemic firefighters that are going to use their logistics, use their ability to build up capacity quickly. They're going to go wherever that problem is. Stopping the next pandemic will require a big investment. But I think of this as the best insurance policy the world could buy. You can read more about this in our annual letter.