Melinda Gates recently told during an interview that she and her husband had been storing food in their basements for a few years now while anticipating a pandemic or some other kind of disaster. She said, ‘A number of years ago, we had talked about, you know, what if there wasn’t clean water? What if there wasn’t enough food? Where might we go? What might we do as a family? So I think we should leave those preparations for ourselves. But absolutely we had prepared and had, you know, some food in the basement in case.’
She goes on to say, ‘What we mostly talk about now in our home every night is how lucky we are. We understand our privilege. And when we say our grace at night, what we’re thankful for, around the table, is that we aren’t struggling to put a meal on the table as so many families around the world are.’
Bill Gates has been warning about a pandemic ever since his 2015 TED Talk and kept saying that the world was not ‘ready for the next epidemic’. In his 2017 op-ed article, Bill Gates writes that the next epidemic might be a ‘super contagious and deadly strain of the flu.’ Bill Gates has been quite vocal during the COVID-19 pandemic and suggests that countries should properly keep track of the virus.
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced an additional $150 million in funding that would be used towards deploying more medical supplies and to help scientists to come up with new treatments and a vaccine for the virus. The foundation has donated a total of $250 million so far towards the global coronavirus response and relief efforts. Maybe we should have listened to the man when he was handing out warnings, do let us know what you think!
