The book’s signature proposal is the GERM Team: a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization force of roughly 3,000 full-time experts, coordinated by the WHO at a cost of about $1 billion per year, whose job would be to monitor outbreaks, run regular preparedness drills, and mobilize when novel pathogens emerge. Gates pairs this with concrete technical goals, most notably the “100-day vaccine” target—the ambition, also pursued by CEPI, of designing, testing, and beginning manufacture of a vaccine for a new pathogen within 100 days of identification—built on the mRNA platforms that proved themselves during COVID.
Gates diagnoses specific COVID failures: testing breakdowns, the slow WHO response, vaccine nationalism, and the failure of COVAX to deliver doses to low-income countries on the promised timeline. He frames inequitable vaccine distribution as both a moral and strategic failure, since uncontrolled spread anywhere generates variants that threaten everyone. He argues that preparedness at the scale he proposes would cost tens of billions annually—a small fraction of the trillions COVID cost.
The book has drawn criticism for underweighting intellectual property and pharmaceutical industry practices in vaccine inequity, and for leaving GERM underspecified on questions of authority and national sovereignty.
• Title: How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
• Author: Bill Gates
• Type: Book
• Publisher: n/a
• Publication time: April, 2022
• Publication place: United States