Gates Package — page 894

l Lawfare. You can find it at https://papers.ssrn.com. I wouldn't advise A notice from the U.S. Treasury Department encouraging proper hygiene and social distancing during the 1918 influenza pandemic. The more I learned, the more I realized just how unprepared the world was for a serious respiratory virus epidemic. I read a report on the World Health Organization's response to the 2009 swine flu epidemic that concluded, prophetically: "The world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained and threatening public-health emergency." The report laid out a step-by-step plan for getting prepared. Few of the steps were taken. The next year, my friend Nathan Myhrvold started telling me about some research he was doing into the greatest threats faced by humanity. Although his biggest worry was an engineered bioweapon--a disease made in the lab--naturally occurring viruses were high on the list. I've known Nathan for decades: He created Microsoft's cutting-edge research division and is a polymath who has done research on cooking (!), dinosaurs, and astrophysics, among other things. He's not prone to exaggerating risks. So when he argued that governments around the world were doing essentially nothing to prepare for pandemics of any kind, either natural or intentionally created, we talked about how to change that.* Nathan uses an analogy that I like. Right now, the building you are sitting in (assuming you're not reading this book at the beach) is probably fitted with smoke detectors. Now, the odds that the building you're in will burn down today are very low--in fact, it might go 100 years * Nathan eventually wrote a paper about these ideas called "Strategic Terrorism: A Call to Action" for the journal Lawfare. You can find it at https://papers.ssrn.com. I wouldn't advise reading it before bed--it is sobering.