Bill Gates again gave his predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic. This Microsoft senior said the severe symptoms that appear in COVID-19 cases have reduced dramatically, but he warned that another pandemic was coming.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Gates said potential future pandemics would likely be caused by other different pathogens from the coronavirus family.
But he added that advances in health technology could help countries cope with the pandemic, if everyone started investing now.
"We will have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen in the future," Gates said, as quoted by CNBC, Saturday (19/2/2022).
After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates said the worst of the effects were already starting to decline as large parts of the global population had acquired immunity. The severity is also starting to decrease in the newest variant of Omicron.
But Gates said it was now too late to reach the vaccination targets set by the World Health Organization. WHO targets vaccination of 70% of the global population by mid-2022, and currently only 61.9% of the world's population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
The 66-year-old added that countries should move faster to develop and distribute vaccines. He also invited countries to invest now.
"The cost of preparing for the next pandemic isn't that great. It's not like climate change. If we're rational, yes, then we can deal with it earlier," Gates said.
Gates, through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has partnered with the Wellcome Trust to donate USD 300 million to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). CEPI is currently seeking to raise $3.5 billion to cut the development time for a new vaccine to 100 days.