Through the Lands of the West and Lombardy The Tiber is a river in Italy said to symbolize the country and its history, according to Andrew Whalen for Newsweek. Not far from the Tiber the land stained with blood,Īnd diverse plagues will be upon mankind." "From the vain enterprise honour and undue complaint,īoats tossed about among the Latins, cold, hunger, waves, In 1555, Michel de Nostredame, or Nostradamus, published "Les Prophéties," a collection of nearly 1,000 prophetic and poetic quatrains (four-line rhyming verses). Gates said in an April interview with the Financial Times that a viral outbreak will likely happen "every 20 years or so." "The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war." "In the case of biological threats, that sense of urgency is lacking," he said. The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise in our interconnected world, he said, whether it happens naturally or is created as a weaponized disease.
He presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling which found that a new flu like the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic would now most likely kill 30 million people within six months. He discussed the threat infectious diseases pose and urged Trump to prioritize the US's preparedness efforts - advice he also gave other 2016 presidential candidates, according to The Wall Street Journal.Īnd in a 2018 discussion about epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine, Gates said a pandemic could happen within the next decade. In a 2015 TED talk, Gates said the world was "not ready for the next epidemic."Īnd he reportedly warned President Donald Trump about the dangers of a pandemic in December 2016. Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Bill Gates speaks at the panel Building Human Capital: A Project for the World, during the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings, in Washington, Saturday, April 21, 2018.