Famous philanthropist Bill Gates has warned that COVID-19 is not the worst pandemic that may befall the world in the future.
According to Financial Times, Gates argued that, despite how highly transmissible the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID turned out to be, “the world could have had to face a pathogen causing a far higher rate of fatalities or severe disease”, as the newspaper put it.
This development comes as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and British biomedical charity Wellcome Trust pledged $150 million each to combat COVID-19 and to prepare for future pandemics.
"None of us believe Omicron will be the last variant, or that Covid-19 will be the last pandemic," Jeremy Farrar, British scientist and director of Wellcome, said as quoted by AFP. "We need a truly global response."
The $300 million donation is expected to go to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) that was established five years ago, and which leads an initiative called Covax whose goal is to distribute COVID vaccines across the developing world.
CEPI has already provided funding for 14 vaccine projects, including those of AstraZeneca, Moderna and Novavax, with Gates saying that “those vaccines made a huge difference, saving lots of lives and getting out very quickly".
CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett also remarked that, while “delivering vaccines in 11 months” as they did back in 2020 was “unprecedented”, it was “certainly not good enough."
"The unprecedented spread of the highly infectious Omicron variant around the world over the past two months exemplifies the ways in which we must be ready, both in terms of speed and the scale of our response, to respond to future threats," Hatchett said.