Bill Gates Warns Of Next Two Threats World Faces After Predicting Virus Outbreak

Bill Gates has warned of the next two disasters facing our planet, having already predicted the outbreak of a virus in the past.

At the time, many of those watching Gates’ talk won’t have realised how quickly this prediction would come to pass, and watching it back feels more than a little disquieting.

You can watch Gates’ TED Talk, titled The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready below:

Six years on and Gates has reflected on his prescience in light of the ongoing pandemic, commenting, ‘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.

You can watch Gates’ recent conversation with Muller below:

Gates then proceeded to offer a few more predictions for the future, neither of which will exactly leave you feeling warm and fuzzy inside:

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.

Gates also went on to remark that humans beings do not have the power to prevent future pandemics, although ‘we could increase our preparedness so we never have a death toll anywhere near what we have today’. Whether or not this time the world will choose to listen to him remains to be seen.