(Newswire.net — February 19, 2017) — Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, warns of potential bio-terrorism predicting the apocalypse. According to him, it is not the question if but when will some terrorist group acquire a deadly bio-weapon.
Gates warned in his speech that terrorists could attack with bio-weapons of mass destruction within the next 15 years, leaving a death toll of 30 million people worldwide, within a single year.
During his speech at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, which was published by the Business Insider, the tech mogul warned that “epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year,” adding there is a “reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”
According to Gates, the pandemic virus could be created either by a strange “quirk of nature” or at the hands of a terrorist organization.
“We ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril”, Gates said at the Security Conference, reminding the audience of the scale of the 1918 flu pandemic which infected the third of a world’s population, claiming up to 100 million lives.
In his speech, the Microsoft founder warned that modern society is lulled in a false sense of security due to the absence of such deadly viruses that can swipe millions in a short period of time, thanks to the advances in modern medicine. However, the society is not prepared for intentional outbreaks that could happen in the near future.
“Most of the things we need to do to protect against a naturally occurring pandemic are the same things we must prepare for an intentional biological attack,” Bill Gates stressed, comparing a bio-weapons attack to a nuclear war and climate change.
While he delivered his speech at the Security Conference, Gates urged authorities to “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war,” by creating vaccines and countermeasures to mitigate the risks associated with the outbreak of various viral infections.
Reducing the time for creating a vaccine, surveillance and cooperation improvement are also among the necessary requirements to tackle a pandemic, according to Gates.
The Microsoft founder and billionaire estimated that the lack of proper preparation can cost up to $570 billion annually.
Gates’ speech at the Munich conference came as no surprise. In almost every public appearance in the last decade, he voiced a concern about bio-terrorism. Most recently, during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January, he warned about the potential dangers of fast-spreading diseases.