Bill Gates, 59, sat down with Ezra Klein, the Editor-in-Chief at Vox, and discussed his fear for humanity.
It’s not a third World War or an asteroid — it’s an epidemic similar to the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918 that killed somewhere between 30 and 50 million people across the globe. Healthcare has vastly improved since the mid 1910s, but so has transportation, making it easier for viruses to cross borders and continents.
“I rate the chance of a nuclear war within my lifetime as being fairly low,” says Gates. “I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, far worse than Ebola, in my lifetime, as well over 50 percent.”
Gates estimates the number of deaths could go as high as 33 million. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly the population of Canada. He says the U.S. government needs to start investing money immediately in research and medical surveillance to prevent an epidemic that he says will happen in his lifetime.
But please bare in mind that Mr Gates in 2010 spoke the following words about how to decrease the population :
“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [number of 9 billion] by perhaps 10 or 15 percent. But there we see an increase of about 1.3 [billion].”
See Mr Gates talk on depopulation here https://youtu.be/6WQtRI7A064
