Why Isn’t Bill Gates Running the Coronavirus Task Force?

When President Trump announced Tuesday night that he was cutting funding for the World Health Organization, the latest move in his attempt to somehow make the WHO the scapegoat for his own administration’s slow and disorganized response to the coronavirus pandemic, critics were quick to raise an alarm.

Without specifically naming Trump or the White House, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said now was “not the time to reduce the resources for the operations of the World Health Organization or any other humanitarian organization in the fight against the virus.” And the American Medical Association issued a statement saying, “Cutting funding to the WHO—rather than focusing on solutions—is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world. The AMA is deeply concerned by this decision and its wide-ranging ramifications, and we strongly urge the president to reconsider.”

But perhaps the most prominent voice to publicly rebuke the president was that of Bill Gates.

Early Wednesday morning, Gates took to Twitter to condemn that decision and to insist that the WHO was playing an essential role in trying to battle and contain this pandemic. “Halting funding for the World Health Organization during a world health crisis is as dangerous as it sounds,” Gates tweeted. “Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19, and if that work is stopped, no other organization can replace them. The world needs @WHO now more than ever.” (Gates wasn’t the only one in the family to express outrage at Trump’s decision. Melinda Gates, his wife and cochair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, simultaneously sent out a tweet with the exact same language.)

The U.S. is the single largest donor to the WHO, having previously committed to $893 million in funding over two years. The Gates Foundation is the next biggest donor to the WHO, making up nearly 10% of the agency’s funding.

In late January, the WHO declared coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern. A week later, the Gates Foundation pledged up to $100 million to help contain the outbreak. Those funds, the foundation said, would be used to “strengthen detection, isolation, and treatment efforts; protect at-risk populations; and develop vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics.”

Although the coronavirus is a previously unknown enemy, Gates has been warning about the dangers of a global pandemic for years. In a 2015 TED Talk, Gates said “If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war—not missiles but microbes,” he said at the time. “We have invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents, but we’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We’re not ready for the next epidemic.”

Two years later, in a 2017 op-ed for Business Insider, Gates wrote, “We ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril. Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”

Referencing the flu pandemic that wiped out millions of lives a little more than 100 years ago, Gates wrote, “The fact that a deadly global pandemic has not occurred in recent history shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence that a deadly pandemic will not occur in the future. And even if the next pandemic isn’t on the scale of the 1918 flu, we would be wise to consider the social and economic turmoil that might ensue if something like Ebola made its way into a lot of major urban centers.”

A week and a half ago, Gates went on Fox News Sunday, Trump’s least favored show on his most favored network. There, the billionaire philanthropist said the coronavirus pandemic is a “nightmare scenario,” but with a strong national response the U.S. coud keep the deaths under the 100,000 to 240,000 figure cited by the White House task force. “If we do the social distancing properly, we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of that,” Gates said. He also urged the Trump administration to implement a national plan for imposing stay-at-home restrictions, instead of leaving it up to the nation’s governors, some of whom have continued to resist lockdowns.

And in an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (done remotely, of course), Gates cautioned that he doesn’t foresee life going “back to normal until we have that phenomenal vaccine or therapeutics that are over 95% effective.” Echoing the projections of health care professionals and world leaders (but not, notably, the president of the United States and the rogue’s gallery of advisers he has assembled around him), Gates estimated such a solution wouldn’t arrive for another 18 months.

This is the voice of reason that should be leading the country’s response to the current pandemic: not the robotically obsequious Mike Pence nor the comically unqualified Jared Kushner—and not the erratic, combative, self-centered person taking the podium at the daily White House briefings.

It’s not going to happen, of course. But it should.

Originally Appeared on Vogue