Ezra Klein: why don't you describe for me as vividly as you can
what it is you're worried about. what it is nightmare scenario looks like?
Bill Gates: Fortunately, there's very few things and most of them are very low
probability
some big volcanic explosion
A giant earthquake, asteroid
At least in the nuclear case
you gotta say we take it quite seriously. We budget a lot of money, have a lot of
people who think about nuclear deterrence,
I'm very glad that works being done and
I rate the chance of a nuclear war in my lifetime has being fairly low.
I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola
in my lifetime as well over 50 percent.
If we look at the 20th Century, and we look at the death chart
of the 20th Century, I think everybody would say oh yeah there must be a spike
from World War I
and you know sure enough there it is like 25 million
and I must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is – like 65 million
but then you'll see this other spike that
is as large as World War II, right after World War I – and most people, a lot
of people say what? Wait a minute – what was that?
There's two kinds of flus:
There's flus that spread between humans very effectively
and there's flus that kill lots of people. And those two properties have
only been combined
I into a widespread flu
once in history. That is Spanish Flu.
We have no idea where it came from – it's called the Spanish flu
because the Spanish press was the freest,
they were the first to talk openly about it.
and so in the annals of epidemic history that's the big event.
I funded a disease modeling group that uses computer simulation
and that work has been phenomenal in helping us
target our polio eradication resources – which parts of nigeria should we
work harder on? And it's very natural if you have a group like that to say hey
look at something like the Spanish flu in the modern day.
Health systems are far better and so you'd think, hey that wouldn't be very bad.
Well, we tried it – and there are some assumptions we had to make – but what we showed is that the
force of infection, because modern transport
which be compared to 1918 is over fifty times as great,
if you get something like the [Spanish] flu and you look at that map
of how within days it's basically
in all urban centers of the entire globe
That is very, uh, eye-opening.
that didn't happen with Spanish flu in the past.
The opportunity in did do more than just
let it run its course is really only in the last decade
basically when you talk about drugs, you can talk about small molecules or you can talk about
these
complex biological protein like things which is a subclass called antibodies
antibodies are the molecules the immune system naturally builds to attack disease
Today, the idea that somebody says oh here's an antibody
make a lot of it made it very quickly that's right on the cutting edge.
and the Ebola epidemic showed me that we're not ready
for a serious epidemic. An epidemic that would be more infectious and would spread faster
than Ebola did. This is the greatest risk
have a huge tragedy. This is the most likely thing by far
to kill over 10 million excess people
in a year. We don't need to invest nearly what we do
in military preparedness. this is something where
less than a billion a year on R&D, medical surveillance,
on standby personnel, cross-training the military so they can play a role in
terms of all the logistics here. This can be done
and we may not get many more warnings like this one
to to say okay it's a pretty modest investment
to avoid something that, really, in terms of the human condition would be a
gigantic setback.