Bill Gates proposes a worldwide pandemic "fire department"

Billionaire Bill Gates has called for funding for the WHO's Global Health Emergency Corps, a network of "firefighters" led by recognized experts and national public health officials, to prevent another pandemic like Covid-19. This network of professionals from every country and region should be well-funded and able to deploy in response to "transnational threats". Gates proposed the organization in his 2022 book, 'How to Prevent the Next Pandemic', and specified its size and funding at 3,000 people and an additional $1 billion in the WHO budget. To be successful, the Emergency Corps must build on existing networks of experts and be led by people like the heads of national public health agencies. Gates believes the 2020 pandemic was due to a collective failure to prepare for pandemics, and his own foundation hosted a pandemic preparedness exercise in October 2019.

He has invested his software fortune into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spending millions on vaccination campaigns, agricultural land, and green energy and alternate food sources. He criticized SpaceX mogul Elon Musk for funding a space program to colonize Mars, saying the money would be better spent on vaccines. His wife Melinda filed for divorce in 2021, citing a number of things, including Bill's ties to accused pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. They continue to manage the foundation together.