Bill And Melinda Gates Think A Weaponized Disease Could Devastate Humanity
One of the scariest plots in a movie or TV show is that of a bioterrorist attack. It’s also one of the most terrifying things that could happen in real life. Melinda Gates thinks so too, because she told Vox founder Ezra Klein that the biggest global risk in the next 10 years is “most definitely” a bioterrorism attack.
“A bioterrorist event could spread so quickly, and we are so unprepared for it,” Gates explained in an interview at South by Southwest. “Think of the number of people who leave New York City every day and go all over the world — we’re an interconnected world.”
Related: China Breaks Ground With World’s First CRISPR Clinical Trials
She’s not wrong. It seems that every time there is a disease or virus — to paraphrase the great Bill Burr — people have the overwhelming urge to get on a plane and travel to different countries.
Bill and Melinda Gates wrote a report called “Goalkeepers” which details that both infectious and chronic diseases from both natural and human-made could be the biggest threat to humanity in the next decade. Bill Gates did say he believed “you can be pretty hopeful there’ll be big progress” on chronic disease, but the threat of random or deliberate bioterrorism could leave us unprepared to react to such an event.
“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year,” Gates detailed in his op-ed for Business Insider in 2017. “And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10-15 years.”
I can see that happening. More and more news reports are coming out about antibiotics becoming less and less effective against new forms or infectious diseases. Hearing about Super AIDS and antibiotic resistant STD’s could just be the start.
Hopefully the gov’t and the CDC can do more to prepare us for potential attacks that will turn us into flesh eating zombies, or the more boring scenario of dying in a bed with your insides liquefying. I choose the former.
(Via Business Insider)
Follow Jeff Sorensen on TWITTER
Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post, UPROXX, BGR and by just looking up his name.
Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com