"We’ll have another pandemic. It will be a different pathogen next time," Gates, who is a co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said at Germany's annual Munich Security Conference.
"The chance of severe disease, which is mainly associated with being elderly and having obesity or diabetes, those risks are now dramatically reduced because of that infection exposure," he explained.
"Next time we should try and make it, instead of two years, we should make it more like six months," he stressed, adding that standardized platforms, such as messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, will enable this. "The cost of being ready for the next pandemic is not that large. It’s not like climate change. If we’re rational, yes, the next time we’ll catch it early."