AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Bill Gates speaks on a panel during the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings in Washington, April 21, 2018.
- Bill Gates has warned for years that pandemics are a major international threat.
- In a new op-ed, he outlines potential solutions for the coronavirus outbreak that has spread to at least 56 countries.
- Gates referred to the outbreak as a pandemic, though the World Health Organization has so far shied away from that declaration.
- The coronavirus, Gates wrote, is behaving like a "once-in-a-century pathogen."
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Bill Gates has warned for years that the world is not ready for a deadly pandemic.
Some of his ominous predictions are now playing out as the deadly coronavirus spreads around the globe. The virus causes a disease known as COVID-19, which has killed almost 2,900 people and infected more than 83,000 others globally since December.
"In the past week, COVID-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we've been worried about," Gates wrote in a new op-ed for the New England Journal of Medicine. "I hope it's not that bad, but we should should assume it will be until we know otherwise."
Gates referred to the outbreak as a pandemic, even though the World Health Organization has not yet made that declaration. The group has said instead that the virus has "pandemic potential."
"In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again," Gates wrote. "The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. We need to save lives."
In the op-ed, Gates suggested the following list of solutions that could help slow the virus' spread:
- Wealthy countries should supply low- and middle-income countries in Africa and southern Asia with trained healthcare workers to monitor the virus' spread and deliver vaccines.
- Establish an international database where countries can share information.
- Develop a system that screens for compounds that have already been safety-tested to use in a potential vaccine.
- Governments and donors should fund manufacturing facilities that can pump out vaccines within weeks.
Gates compared COVID-19 to the 1957 flu pandemic, which killed more than 1 million people, and the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people. The current outbreak, he wrote, is somewhere in-between.
Gates said everyone should have access to an affordable vaccine
Gates predicted that large-scale trials for a coronavirus vaccine could happen as early as June. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health's infectious-disease center, recently said that he hopes to start testing vaccine candidates in people by mid-April.
Associated Press
However, drug development is typically a multiyear process that can cost roughly $1 billion in the US. Gates said making vaccines affordable for everyone is the "right strategy" for containing the coronavirus outbreak.
"Given the economic pain that an epidemic can impose - we're already seeing how COVID-19 can disrupt supply chains and stock markets, not to mention people's lives - it will be a bargain," he wrote.
On Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declined to promise that a future coronavirus vaccine would be affordable for all Americans. But he backtracked day later, saying that any vaccine developed in conjunction with the US government would need to be financially accessible to the public.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already contributed $100 million toward the fight to contain the outbreak. In his op-ed, Gates said warding off a pandemic will require billions of dollars.
"There is no time to waste," he wrote.
Although China has seen a drop-off in its rate of new cases in recent days, the coronavirus has spread to at least 55 other countries. At least 72 people have died outside of mainland China.
Read more:
- Americans are being told to prepare for a coronavirus outbreak - but US health agencies lack funding, and disease testing lags behind
- The coronavirus has pandemic 'potential' as it spreads in South Korea, Italy, and Iran, according to WHO
- The FDA just announced the first drug shortage caused by the coronavirus, but wouldn't identify the drug