NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Kelsey Piper

Bill Gates saw this coming.

“I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, in my lifetime, as well over 50 percent,” he told Ezra Klein in 2015. “Something like the Spanish flu in the modern day — health systems are far better, so you think, okay, that wouldn’t be very bad. What we showed [when infectious disease researchers working with the Gates Foundation modeled the scenario] was that the force of the infection, because of modern transport … within days, it’s basically in all urban centers of the entire globe.”

The world’s second–richest man (he recently lost the top spot to Jeff Bezos) has, in the years since he and his wife founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, made a name for himself in philanthropy, especially in the field of public health. The foundation funds vaccinations through programs like GAVI, which Gates set up with a $750 million grant in 1999 and which is estimated to have saved millions of lives.

Photo courtesy of DFID.