How to Prevent the Next Pandemic Quotes

“It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do.

In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“Creating a PCR test for a new pathogen is a pretty easy task once you’ve sequenced its genome. Because you already know what its genes look like, you can create the special substances, dye, and other necessary products very quickly—which is why researchers were able to establish PCR tests for COVID just twelve days after the first genome sequences were published.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“It’s mind-blowing how cheap and effective masks are.

This is a little hard to admit, because the power of inventing things is so central to my worldview, but it’s true: We may never devise a cheaper, more effective way to block the transmission of certain respiratory viruses than a piece of inexpensive material with a couple of elastic straps sewn onto it.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“Droplets, being on the larger side, typically contain more virus than an aerosol, which makes them a better mechanism for transmission. On the other hand, because they’re relatively heavy, they don’t make it more than a few feet from your mouth or nose before falling to the ground.
The surface that a droplet lands on becomes what’s called a fomite, and how long the fomite is able to transmit the virus depends on several factors, including the type of pathogen and whether you sneezed or coughed it out (in which case it’s more protected because it’s covered in your mucus). Studies show that even though the COVID virus may be able to survive for a few hours, or even days, it’s quite rare for people to get sick from touching a contaminated surface. In fact, even if someone does happen to touch a fomite, the chances that the person will get infected are less than 1 in 10,000.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“During COVID, one challenge with conventional contact tracing is that it’s not an especially efficient use of resources, because the virus is not transmitted at the same rate by everyone who’s infected. If you get the original COVID strain, the chances are not especially high that you’ll pass it along to someone else. (About 70 percent of those cases may not transmit to anyone else at all.) But if you do pass it along to someone else, you probably pass it along to many people. For reasons we don’t entirely understand, 80 percent of COVID infections with early variants came from just 10 percent of the cases. (These numbers could be different for the Omicron variant—as I write this, we don’t have enough data to know.) So with a virus like COVID, using the conventional approach means you’ll spend a lot of time finding people who wouldn’t have infected anyone else—epidemiologically speaking, you’ll find yourself in a lot of cul-de-sacs. What you really want to do is find the main thoroughfares, the relatively small number of people who are causing the most infections.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“In the fall of 2020, as we got closer to flu season, I started to worry. Every year, influenza kills tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of people around the world, nearly all of them elderly. Even more are hospitalized. At a time when COVID was overwhelming or at least sorely testing virtually every health system on the planet, a bad flu season could have been disastrous.
But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically.
By the time you read this book, of course, things may have changed. Flu strains have a way of disappearing for long periods and then suddenly recurring without explanation. But the huge decline in cases across the board is unmistakable, however long it lasts, and we know why: Nonpharmaceutical interventions made a dramatic difference in reducing flu transmission when combined with the prior immunity and vaccinations that people had.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“The pandemic also exposed one of the biggest myths about remote education—that it could ever replace classroom work for kids in the early grades. I’m a big fan of online learning, but I have always thought of it as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the work that young students and teachers do together in person. (In the United States, we mostly use the terms remote learning and online learning interchangeably, but many other countries provided lessons over the radio, television, and e-books as well as online.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“I also couldn’t help noticing how often news reports about some modeler’s latest findings would leave out important nuances and caveats. In March 2020, Neil Ferguson, a highly respected epidemiologist at Imperial College, predicted that there could be more than 500,000 COVID deaths in the U.K. and more than 2 million in the U.S. over the course of the pandemic. That caused quite a stir in the press, but few reporters mentioned a key point that Ferguson had been very clear about: The scenario of his that made all the headlines assumed that people wouldn’t change their behavior—that no one would wear masks or shelter in place, for instance—but of course that wouldn’t be the case in reality. He wanted to show how high the stakes were and demonstrate the value of masks and other interventions, not drive everyone into a panic.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.”
That’s a quote from Tony Fauci, and I agree. The irony of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) is that the better they work, the easier it is to criticize the people who put them in place. If a city or state adopts them early enough, the case numbers will stay low, and critics will find it easy to say they weren’t necessary.

For example, in March 2020, officials in the city and county of St. Louis took several steps to limit transmission, including a shelter-in-place order. As a result, the initial outbreak in St. Louis was not as severe as it was in many other U.S. cities, leading some to suggest that the policies were an overreaction. But one study found that if the government had implemented the very same interventions just two weeks later, the number of deaths would have shot up sevenfold. St. Louis would have been on par with some of the hardest-hit areas in the country.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“Early in the pandemic, there was a broad belief in the scientific community that, although there would be some mutations of COVID, they wouldn’t cause a big problem. By early 2021, scientists knew that variants were emerging, but they appeared to be evolving in similar ways, leading some scientists to hope that the world had already seen the worst mutations that the virus was capable of. But the Delta variant proved otherwise—its genome had evolved to make it far more transmissible. The arrival of Delta was a bad surprise, but it convinced everyone that even more variants could show up. As I finish this book, the world is facing a sweeping wave of Omicron, the fastest-spreading variant to date—and in fact the fastest-spreading virus we’ve ever seen.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“The stories of people who are making sacrifices to help others during this crisis could fill an entire book. Around the world, health care workers put themselves at risk to treat sick people—according to the WHO, more than 115,000 had lost their lives taking care of COVID patients by May 2021. First responders and frontline workers kept showing up and doing their jobs. People checked in on neighbors and bought groceries for them when they couldn’t leave home. Countless people followed the mask mandates and stayed home as much as possible. Scientists worked around the clock, using all their brainpower to stop the virus and save lives. Politicians made decisions based on data and evidence, even though these decisions weren’t always the popular choice.
Not everyone did the right thing, of course. Some people have refused to wear masks or get vaccinated. Some politicians have denied the severity of the disease, shut down attempts to limit its spread, and even implied that there’s something sinister in the vaccines. It’s impossible to ignore the impact their choices are having on millions of people, and there’s no better proof of those old political clichés: Elections have consequences, and leadership matters.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“IHME’s data also suggests that a country’s success against COVID correlates roughly with how much people there trust the government. This makes intuitive sense, since if you have confidence in your government, you’re more likely to follow its guidelines for preventing COVID. On the other hand, trust in government is measured by polls, and if you live under an especially repressive regime, you’re probably not going to tell a random pollster what you really think about the government. And in any case, this finding doesn’t easily translate into practical advice that can be implemented quickly. Building trust between people and their government takes years of painstaking, purposeful work.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“And the odds that a pandemic will strike are only going up. That’s partly because, with urbanization, humans are invading natural habitats at a growing rate, interacting with animals more often, and creating more opportunities for a disease to jump from them to us. It’s also because international travel is skyrocketing (or at least it was before COVID slowed its growth): In 2019, before COVID, tourists around the world made 1.4 billion international arrivals every year—up from just 25 million in 1950. The fact that the world had gone a century since a catastrophic pandemic—the most recent one, the flu of 1918, killed something like 50 million people—is largely a matter of luck.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“When I got back from South Africa, I wanted to have an in-depth conversation about COVID-19 at the foundation. There was one central question I could not stop thinking about and wanted to explore at length: Could it be contained, or would it go global?
I turned to a favorite tactic that I’ve been relying on for years: the working dinner. You don’t bother with an agenda; you simply invite a dozen or so smart people, provide the food and drinks, tee up a few questions, and let them start thinking out loud. I’ve had some of the best conversations of my working life with a fork in my hand and a napkin in my lap.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“When you start reading up on infectious diseases, it isn’t long before you come to the subject of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. The definitions for these terms are less strict than you may think. A good rule of thumb is that an outbreak is when a disease spikes in a local area, an epidemic is when an outbreak spreads more broadly within a country or region, and a pandemic is when an epidemic goes global, affecting more than one continent. And some diseases don’t come and go, but stay consistently in a specific location—those are known as endemic diseases. Malaria, for instance, is endemic to many equatorial regions. If COVID-19 never goes away completely, it’ll be classified as an endemic disease.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“The first thing you have to do is define success, but that’s not as easy as you might think. You can’t just look at how often people with COVID in a given country went on to die from it. That statistic will be skewed by the fact that older people are more likely to die from COVID than younger people, so countries with especially old populations will almost inevitably look worse. (One country that did particularly well—even though it has the world’s oldest population—is Japan. It had the best compliance with mask mandates of any country, which helps explain some of its success, but other factors were probably also at play.)”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic

“Unfortunately, not every criticism of me is as thoughtful. Throughout COVID, I’ve marveled at how I became the target of wild conspiracy theories. It’s not an entirely new sensation—nutty ideas about Microsoft have been around for decades—but the attacks are more intense now. I have never known whether to engage with them or not. If I ignore them, they keep spreading. But does it actually persuade anyone who buys into these ideas if I go out and say, “I am not interested in tracking your movements, I honestly don’t care where you’re going, and there is no movement tracker in any vaccine”? I’ve decided that the best way forward is to just keep doing the work and believe that the truth will outlive the lies.”
― Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic