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Bill Gates Is Calling Another Pandemic. And Once Again, He’s Damn Right.
Welcome to the Pandemicene
In 2015, Bill Gates took the TED Talk stage for a presentation that today may sound prophetic.
“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus,” he said.
Only one year earlier, the world had averted a worrisome outbreak of Ebola. And the reasons why it did not spread globally were essentially three.
The efforts of health workers. The spread confined to a few urban centers. And the nature of the virus: Ebola is not airborne, and those infected are so sick they are bedridden.
A concatenation of randomness that Gates called just a fluke. If infected people had felt well enough to lead their ordinary lives, we might not have been so lucky.
This eventuality would have happened only a few years later with COVID-19. And we all know how that turned out.
Recently, Bill Gates returned to warn about the risk of new pandemics potentially even more severe than COVID-19. And again, it’s not a presage. Gates has just looked at the numbers.
The population’s good immunity levels have drastically reduced the worst consequences of Covid. But that does…
