Tip of the Month
Hear Bill Gates’s Warning about Pandemic Preparedness
Shattuck Lecture Video Is Online and Text Is Published in NEJM
June 1, 2018
Bill Gates cautions that the world is unprepared for the next deadly global pandemic. “Watching Hollywood thrillers, you’d think the world was pretty good at protecting the public from deadly microorganisms. In the real world, though, the health infrastructure we have for normal times breaks down very rapidly during major infectious disease outbreaks.”
The Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft founder delivered these sober comments to an online, global audience of thousands during the Shattuck Lecture, an annual talk presented by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Massachusetts Medical Society. A Perspective article adapted from his talk was published in the May 31 issue of NEJM. You can also watch the full speech here.
NEJM Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Drazen, MD, had pursued Gates as a Shattuck lecturer for years. “His goal is to improve world health and the Shattuck Lecture is about the state of health,” Drazen said during his opening remarks. “I can’t think of a better person to give it.”
Gates’s lecture coincided with the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish flu pandemic that killed an estimated three to five percent of the world’s population.
