Bill Gates

“In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready.”

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.”

“And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all.”

“There's no need to panic.”

“We're not ready for the next epidemic.”

“There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood.”

“But we need to get going, because time is not on our side.”

“The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths.”

“So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0.”

“Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this.”

“We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen.”

“We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise.”

“When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war.”

“You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market.”

“The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism.”

“Not missiles, but microbes.”

“So next time, we might not be so lucky.”

“We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are.”

“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.”