Photo: PA
Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has warned in a new interview that the two greatest threats the world currently faces are global warming and bioterrorism. In the interview with YouTube channel Veritasium, Gates stresses that both of these are far more dangerous than the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic which has claimed well over 2 million lives worldwide.
The interview has already caught the attention of viewers and the wider public media due to the fact that Gates warned about a deadly pandemic, just like the one we are currently facing, in a TED talk back in 2015.
In the interview, he warns that tens-of-millions of people could be killed by a bioterrorist attack. He said of the threats:
"One is climate change. Every year that would be a death toll even greater than we have had in this pandemic. Bio-terrorism. Somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus and that means the cost, the chance of running into this is more than the naturally-caused epidemics like the current one."
He continued, referencing his previous predictions pre-Covid19:
"There's no good feeling that comes with something like this saying 'I told you so'. Could I have been more persuasive? There are a number of respiratory viruses and from time to time one will come along. Respiratory diseases are very scary because you're still walking around on a plane, a bus when you're infectious. Unlike some other diseases like Ebola where you are mostly in a hospital bed by the time viral load infects other people."
Gates made the same warnings regarding bioterrorism and global warming at a Munich security conference 3 years ago in which he stated:
"We ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril. Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years."
"It's hard to get your mind around a catastrophe of that scale, but it happened not that long ago. In 1918, a particularly virulent and deadly strain of flu killed between 50 million and 100 million people."
In terms of global warming, it is promising that states are now acting to lessen their carbon-footprint, however, questions remain as to whether they are acting fast enough or whether their efforts will be enough to stop a climate disaster that could lead to mass-starvation and mass-migration.
[h/t: Lad Bible]
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