[0:00]Why don't you describe for me as vividly as you can. What it is you're worried about? What it is that the nightmare scenario looks like. Unfortunately, there's very few things and most of them are very low probability. Uh, you know, some big volcanic explosion, uh, gigantic earthquake, asteroid. Well, it's been the nuclear case. You've got to say we take it quite seriously. We budget a lot of money, have a lot of people who think about nuclear deterrence and
[0:36]I'm very glad that work's been done and I rate the chance of a nuclear war in my lifetime is being fairly low. Uh I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola and my lifetime is well over 50%.
[0:50]If we look at the 20th century and we look at the death chart of the 20th century, I think everybody would say, oh yeah, there must be a spike for World War I. You know, sure enough, there it is like 25 million, and there must be a big spike for 2, and there it is it's like 65 million. But then you'll see this other spike that is as large as World War two right after World War I, and most people, a lot of people would say, well, what was that? There's two kinds of flues. There's flues that spread between humans very effectively, and there's flues that kill lots of people. And those two properties have only been combined uh into a widespread flu once in history. Well, that is Spanish flu. We have no idea where it came from. It's called the Spanish flu because the Spanish press was the first they were the first to talk openly about it. And so in the annals of epidemic history, that's the big event. I funded a disease modeling group that uses computer simulation, and that work has been phenomenal in helping us target our poly-eradication resources and you know, which parts of Nigeria should we work harder on?
[2:08]And it's very natural if you have a group like that to say, hey, look at something like the Spanish flu in the modern day, health systems are far better. And so you think, hey, that wouldn't be very bad while we tried it and and there are some assumptions we had to make. But what we showed is that the force of infection because of modern transport, which compared to 1918 is over 50 times is great. And so if you get something like a flu, and you look at that map of how within days, it's basically in all urban centers of the entire globe, that is very uh uh eye opening. That didn't happen with Spanish flow in the past.
[2:55]The opportunity to do more than just let it run its course is really only in the last decade. Basically, when you talk about drugs, you can talk about small molecules or talk about these complex biological protein like things, of which is a sub-class called antibodies. Antibodies are the molecules that the immune system naturally builds to attack disease. Today, the idea that somebody says, oh, here's an antibody, make a lot of it, make it very quickly. That's right on the cutting edge. And the Ebola epidemic showed me that we're not ready for a serious epidemic. An epidemic that would be more infectious and would spread faster than Ebola did. This is the greatest risk of a huge tragedy. This is the most likely thing by far to kill over 10 million excess people in a year. We don't need to invest nearly what we do in military preparedness. This is something where less than a billion a year on R&D, medical surveillance, uh standby personnel, cross training the military so they can play a role in terms of all the logistics. This can be done, and we may not get many more warnings like this one to to say, okay, it's a pretty modest investment to avoid something that really, in terms of the the human condition, would be a a gigantic setback.
