It was Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and not the 16th-century astrologer Nostradamus, who accurately predicted the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. The billionaire who is one of the foremost philanthropists on the planet, in Ted talk titled ‘The next outbreak’ delivered in 2015, had warned that a microbe and not war is more likely to kill millions of people around the planet in the next 10 years. 

“If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades it's highly likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, microbes,” Gates had said.

Gates had cited the Ebola outbreak to point out that the world had no defence against a global viral outbreak five years ahead of the 2020 pandemic. As of Saturday, Covid 19 has infected over 104.3 million people worldwide and killed 2.271 million, as per latest figures from the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The video of the Ted talk went viral in 2020 as the pandemic struck but Gates said he didn’t feel good about his production coming true. 

“There's no good feeling that comes with something like this,” the billionaire philanthropist recently told Derek Muller while speaking to him for his YouTube channel ‘Veritasium’.  

"Could I have been more persuasive?" he rued. 

On being probed by Muller about next potential catastrophes facing the world, Gates flagged ‘climate change’ and ‘bio terrorism’ as future threats.

"One is climate change. Every year that would be a death toll even greater than we have had in this pandemic," the co-founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation warned.   

He added, "Bio-terrorism. Somebody who wants to cause damage could engineer a virus and that means the cost, the chance of running into this is more than the naturally-caused epidemics like the current one." 

Gates, one of the richest people in the world, also believes that humans will not be able to stop the next pandemic.