"We need to plan to fight disease outbreaks just as we prepare to fight fires," Gates said in a New York Times opinion article published on Sunday. This refers to "a well-funded system that is prepared to take immediate action when danger arises."
He supported the Global Health Emergency Corps, a network of "elite health emergency leaders," which the WHO is attempting to establish. In order to respond to "transnational dangers," this "corps of professionals from every country and area" must be well-funded and capable of deployment, according to Gates.
In his 2022 book, "How to Avoid the Next Pandemic," Gates suggested such a group, but he dubbed it Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) and set its personnel and money requirements at 3,000 people and an additional $1 billion from the WHO budget.
Gates insisted that the Emergency Corps needed to build on existing networks of experts and be led by people like the heads of national public health agencies and their leads for epidemic response, despite the fact that the Covid-19 response was led by the existing public health establishment, which he himself had called out as insufficient.
"Collective inability to prepare for pandemics despite multiple warnings," said Gates of the 2020 pandemic. In October 2019, his own charity held a pandemic readiness drill called "Event 201" that was themed around a brand-new coronavirus spreading over the world. The event's co-host, Johns Hopkins University, was eventually forced to make it clear that the exercise had nothing to do with the genuine coronavirus outbreak.
Gates said in the Times that "the world must act now to ensure that COVID-19 becomes the last pandemic, and one of the largest actions we can make is to assist the world's foremost health organization, the WHO, and invest in the Global Health Emergency Corps so it can fulfill its full potential.
The co-founder of Microsoft donated millions of dollars from his software fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support pandemic preparedness and vaccine initiatives. Besides from investing millions in green energy and alternative food sources, Gates has also purchased agricultural land in the US. He slammed SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk in an interview from last month, suggesting the money would be better used to research medicines.
Bill's wife Melinda filed for divorce in 2021, alleging a number of factors that had accumulated over the years, including Bill's connections to Jeffrey Epstein, an alleged pedophile and sex trafficker. Yet, they continue to run the foundation together.
