Bill Gates

“If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.”

“The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war.”

“Ebola does not spread through the air.”

“That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water.”

“NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained?”

“If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger.”

“But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic.”

“And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden.”

“Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics.”

“Now, Médecins Sans Frontières did a great job orchestrating volunteers.”

“We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here.”

“The primary healthcare, the R&D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe.”

“So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system.”

“Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm.”

“About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries.”

“We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement.”

“We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving.”

“But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries.”

“They found the people and they prevented more infections.”

“We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread.”

“When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel.”

“We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them.”

“First, we need strong health systems in poor countries.”

“The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn't go so well.”

“As an example, we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them.”

“The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about.”

“These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic.”

“So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse.”

“But in fact, we can build a really good response system.”

“And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers.”