Bill Gates Forecasts New, More Awful Pandemic, World Must Get Prepared

With better testing, new treatments and vaccines raising hopes for an eventual end to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill Gates is mapping out a battle plan for the next time a dangerous new pathogen appears.

In the annual letter from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Microsoft co-founder calls for billions of dollars in investments to develop a global alert system for emerging germs and build the capacity to respond quickly.

"We can't afford to be caught flat-footed again," Gates wrote. "To prevent the hardship of this last year from happening again, pandemic preparedness must be taken as seriously as we take the threat of war."

While the cost may sound high, billions spent on infrastructure and technology would represent a huge savings compared to the estimated  trillion global toll of COVID-19 and its associated economic fallout, he said.

Gates has long been sounding the alarm about pandemic dangers, including in a 2015 TED talk that has been viewed more than 39 million times. While it might have been easy to ignore those warnings when the last major outbreak was a century in the past, that's no longer possible, he says.

"No one needs to be convinced that an infectious disease could kill millions of people or shut down the global economy."

Rich countries now need to double down on spending for research and development, he said. That includes work on "mega-diagnostic" testing platforms, which Gates predicts could allow screening of more than 100 million people every week.

Such large-scale testing would be the backbone of the global alert system he envisions, where a rural health-care worker in Zambia or Bangladesh who notices unusual sickness could send specimens for rapid testing and genetic sequencing.

He...