Bill Gates Is So Over This Pandemic
By Steven Levy
The acerbic optimist thinks anxious people (like me) need to move on from Covid and start planning for the next vicious pathogen.
WHEN BILL GATES took the stage at this year's TED conference, he brought with him a battered wooden bucket he'd made by hand. With a wide mouth and small handles at the top, the water pail was a replica of one from ancient Rome. In the year 6 AD, a devastating fire prompted Emperor Augustus to organize the Cohortes Vigilum—the night watch. The watchmen relied on this not-so-disruptive technology to fulfill their duties as Rome's dedicated firefighting squad.
Standing in front of the crowd in Vancouver in his usual crewneck sweater and dress slacks, Gates used the prop to illustrate one of the points in his new book, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He proposed a modern version of the Cohortes Vigilum that sounds almost like a pitch for a television series: a permanent team of 3,000 people around the globe called GERM—Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization. The group would monitor potential outbreaks, develop close relationships with public health officials around the world, and oversee drills to prepare for the inevitable—and potentially even worse—sequels to Covid.
The insistent optimism he brought to this idea and much of his speech was nothing like the bleak alarm of his 2015 TED talk, a jeremiad about our lack of preparedness for an imminent pandemic. That presentation has garnered 43 million views on the TED site; unfortunately, he says, 90 percent of them came after Covid made his prediction tragically accurate.
Still, it wasn't until I sat down with Gates a few hours after this year's speech that I realized how fully his attention has shifted away from what, to my mind at least, is an ongoing crisis. He even
