Bill Gates doesn’t just want to prevent the next pandemic; he wants to make our planet pandemic-proof. And he has a plan for it all.
Gates has been invested in public health issues long before the emergence of COVID-19. He has worked extensively on eradicating polio since the 1980s through the philanthropic Gates Foundation and has taken a front seat in the quest for finding a global solution to COVID.
In his new book, How to Prevent The Next Pandemic, the tech mogul and philanthropist details his plan for creating a firefighter-like global body called the GERM team, which stands for Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization. In Gates’ futuristic proposal, GERM is a full-time, paid group whose entire mission is to prepare for the next global outbreak. It would be a 3000-member body of global responders which will be managed by the WHO. GERM will consist of epidemiologists, data scientists, logistics experts, and communications and diplomacy specialists.
“Amazingly, today, we do not have a large global organization dedicated to preventing pandemics,” Bill Gates addressed the world on his personal YouTube channel. “There are some part-timers. The WHO helps the world with lots of health issues, but it hasn’t been given the resources to have this dedicated team.”
Like firefighters, the GERM team would do drills, prepare themselves for real and imagined threats where they “play” different scenarios of pandemic outbreaks and react accordingly, according to Gates. The drill goes like this: epidemiologists will sound the alarm when they detect suspicious clusters of disease anywhere worldwide, mobilizing a chain of events to track the disease and share data and recommendations with governments. Following that, governments and pharmaceutical companies will collaborate to use factories worldwide to rapidly-produce diagnostics and vaccines and ship them where they are needed. “Practice is key,” said Gates.
Gates hopes to secure a whopping $1 billion a year from interested governments to cover the salaries and other expenses of GERM members. He also insists that the WHO, the only group that can give it global credibility, coordinates it.
In 2015, the tech giant famously predicted the rise of COVID-19 in a TED talk that has been watched by millions of people. In his speech, Gates said that governments are not ready for “another pandemic” in reference to the then-raging Ebola pandemic. He could not have been more right.
