Bill Gates gave a key note speech at the TED2022 conference on Tuesday, and referenced his 2015 talk in which he warned a pandemic was on the horizon, and we weren’t ready for it.
Today, Gates said he hoped the current COVID-19 crisis would spur his audience at TED2022 in Vancouver, Canada to pay closer attention to his advice about how to prevent another pandemic wreaking similar havoc on society.
“When I was on this stage in 2015, I was one of many people who said we weren’t ready and we needed to get ready. We didn’t,” Gates said. “The speech actually was watched by a lot of people, but 90% of the views were after it was too late.”
In the 2015 talk, Gates said the world was “not ready for the next epidemic” and viruses pose the “greatest risk of global catastrophe” compared to other threats to humanity. A YouTube video of his 2015 presentation has garnered more than 36 million views so far.
“If anything kills over 10 million people over the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes,” Gates said at the time.
