Bill Gates has shared three key areas working on which may ensure that the world does not face another pandemic.
Taking to Twitter, the fourth richest person in the world and the co-founder of Microsoft shared his blog post on the "3 things we can do right now."
"For decades, people told the world to get ready for a pandemic, but hardly anyone made it a priority. Then Covid struck, and stopping it became the most important thing on the global agenda," Gates wrote.
"Governments need to take action now to get ready for the next pathogen, while all of us still remember how awful Covid was (and still is) and feel the urgency of never allowing another one to happen."
1.) Make and deliver better tools The first step to in any pandemic-prevention plan should be to keep investing in better vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics, Gates said. "it took nearly two years to find effective treatments for Covid," he wrote on GatesNotes.
"The trajectory of the pandemic would’ve looked a lot different if we had found them sooner. We need to build out the systems that will allow us to make new treatments much faster in the future."
2.) Improve disease monitoring The next key area that Bill Gates wants governments to focus on is GERM—Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization. According to him, the GERM team is one of the most important steps to stop the next pandemic.
"At a minimum, many low- and middle-income countries need stronger registries of births and deaths, so that GERM can work with local organizations to more easily spot if there’s an unusual pattern worth investigating," Gates said.
He added that there is a need to expand our capacity to sequence the genomes of pathogens in order to track new variants.
3.) Strengthen health systems "The pandemic devastated health systems around the world, but the need in low-income countries is especially acute," Gates wrote in his blog.
"The fundamental challenge is that they don’t have the funding, expert capacity, or institutions they need to offer basic health services to all their people, let alone manage a major outbreak."
The billionaire also pointed out that a major part of the Gates Foundation -- which he co-founded with former wife Melinda -- has been to help improve health systems which he termed are "investments that both save lives, end preventable infectious diseases, and pave the way for economic growth."
Gates, however, added, "But philanthropy alone cannot close the gap between rich and poor countries. "
"All of these efforts -- new tools, better disease surveillance, and improved health systems -- won’t be cheap, but they will save lives and money in the long run," he said.
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