Co-chair of Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Bill Gates on his 2015 'virus' warning, efforts to fight coronavirus pandemic
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, chair and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, joins Chris Wallace on 'Fox News Sunday.'
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About Bill Gates
Bill Gates, co-chair of the Gates Foundation, faced renewed scrutiny in February 2026 following the release of Justice Department documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. The documents included draft emails, apparently written by Epstein to himself, containing graphic and unverified allegations about Gates. Gates denied the claims in interviews, stating that he only attended dinners with Epstein, never went to Epstein's island, and never met any women through him. He said he regretted every minute spent with Epstein and apologized for the association. His ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, said in response to the documents that questions about the allegations were for her ex-husband to answer, not her. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Gates focused on global health and artificial intelligence. He announced a $50 million partnership between the Gates Foundation and OpenAI called "Horizon 1000," which aims to deploy AI tools in 1,000 primary healthcare clinics in Africa, starting in Rwanda. Gates described the initiative as a way to improve healthcare quality and efficiency by using AI to reduce paperwork and help patients communicate in their local languages. He also warned that global health funding cuts had led to an increase in childhood deaths for the first time in 25 years, with 4.8 million children under five dying in 2025 compared to 4.6 million the year before. Gates said the U.S. aid cuts were "abrupt and cruel" and expressed hope that funding would be restored.
Transcript (22 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Chris0:07
I want to play a clip for you. It's been viewed more than 26 million times.
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Bill Gates0:17
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.
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Chris0:31
That was Bill Gates back in 2015, five years ago, warning about precisely the kind of threat we are all facing right now. Since then, Gates has been doing everything he can to prevent a pandemic. Two months ago, the Gates Foundation committed $100 million to fight the coronavirus. Earlier I sat down with Bill Gates to discuss what we need to do now.
Bill, it took four months to reach half a million cases around the world and just seven days to add another half-million cases. So how dangerous, how fearsome is this virus, and how do you see this epidemic playing out in the U.S.?
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Bill Gates1:19
Well, this is a nightmare scenario because human-to-human transmission, respiratory viruses can grow exponentially. And if we had kept on going to work, traveling like we were, that curve would never bend until you have the majority of the people infected and then a massive number seeking hospital care and lots and lots of death. So we had to use quarantine, which is an old thing back from the days of the plague, as our primary tool. Fortunately, if we use that well enough, we should towards the end of this month start to see those numbers level off. And then if we continue country-wide and we are testing the right people to understand what's going on, which is not the case yet, those numbers will start to go down, and then we can look at some degree of opening back up.
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Chris2:19
President Trump's top health advisors are talking about somewhere between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths over the next two months. Does that sound about right to you in terms of the lethality and the length of the outbreak here in the U.S.?
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Bill Gates2:38
Well, if we do the social distancing properly, we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of that. It's very important that those numbers are out there because a lot of people are still thinking, hey, this is like normal, if not waking up every day to a completely new reality. So I was very glad that those are out there. Dr. Fauci is doing a very good job of saying the numbers are what count here. And the various models that we in the university do show that without this dramatic behavior change, you could even get worse than that. But I do think if we get the testing fixed, we get all 50 states involved, we will be below that. Of course, we will pay a huge economic price in order to achieve that.
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Chris3:32
You say that if we do everything right now in terms of testing and shutting the country down, that we should have only one wave of this virus. Why are you so confident? Because a lot of people aren't so sure that we are not going to have a recurrence when we get another flu season next fall.
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Bill Gates3:54
We don't know how seasonal this virus is. It would probably be good for the Northern Hemisphere if the force of infection goes down when we get into spring and summer and give us some time to get both the drugs and advance the vaccine. It is fair to say things won't go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we've gotten out to basically the entire world. And so, the best people at the foundation were all about high-volume vaccines and are working with many manufacturers, not only getting that billions of dose capacity. And so like China, there will be a partial opening up, which some jobs will resume, school will resume, but will have to be very, very careful not to have the rebound until the vaccine comes.
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Chris4:52
You talk about the foundation. All the way back on February 5th, the Gates Foundation committed $100 million to fight this virus. But you point out the fact that our government, like a lot of other governments, was very slow to respond. Really, another two months we might have lost. How much did that cost us in terms of the spread of this disease, that one or two months that we lost to?
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Bill Gates5:18
There are countries like Taiwan who are exemplary. They saw the problem and really got the testing, community-wide testing done very well. They prioritized to get tested, and so they won't either have the disease or the economic effect that other countries will have. China, by late January, had taken it seriously, so their ability to get the cases to come down has been dramatic. So there are lessons that we are learning from, and we are all in this together. We've got to get rid of coronavirus from the entire world. The U.S., we can see how tough it is here. Likely it will be even worse in the developing countries who as yet don't have nearly as many cases.
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Chris6:10
How do you think the federal and the state governments are responding now, and would you prefer to see it all being handled on a national level, whether it's stay-at-home orders or testing or the supply chain? Would you prefer to see this all being handled on a national centralized level rather than state-by-state?
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Bill Gates6:31
When you have finite resources, you need to allocate them to where there is the most. Certainly because people move around the country, we have to have the shutdown, or else you'll have exponential growth that will spread back into other parts of the country. In terms of testing, people have gotten confused and think it's just about numbers. The key is that you have a response to the test in less than 24 hours, and that you're prioritizing the right people. And so although the numbers are going up, we are not yet focusing in on that, you know, medical personnel or somebody who's keeping the food distribution working and being able to save somebody who tests, very quickly test their contacts. So I do think that allocation, prioritization of testing will be a key tactic for us to get into good shape.
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Chris7:30
And that needs to be done at a national level, not a state level?
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Bill Gates7:34
That's right. If you have some states that just happen to have a number of PCR machines in that state that are very few, you wouldn't think that's the way they should be done. Also, the outbreak is bigger in some areas, and therefore that drives the testing demand. Likewise, the ventilator demand. I mean, this is all very ad hoc because we never did a full-blown simulation. There were a few things done, but it's not like war where we do war games all the time, we have people standing by, resources standing by in a dramatic level. We're kind of figuring this out as we go, which people are rising to the occasion and it's fantastic to see that, but every day we can see that case number is still going up.
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Chris8:26
When you gave that famous TED talk five years ago, you laid out a lot of the things that we are starting to do now, like research and development on diagnostics and R&D on vaccines. But so many countries around the world, including the U.S. back in 2015, largely ignored your warnings. Why do you think that was?
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Bill Gates8:55
Well, it's hard to put money into something where you don't know if it's going to happen. We do for fires because we've seen that over time. We do for war. In fact, 600 billion a year. In that case, what would have been required is nothing like that. The ability to make a test super, the ability to know a library of drugs that would work for this, and you have the vaccine very quickly. I am sure after this, which is just such a gigantic impact, that we will put that money in. But between 2015 and 2020, we have less than 5% of what should have been done was done. People didn't get that this is the biggest single threat that could disrupt our way of life. Even having predicted that as a risk, I'm really stunned at how tough it is to go through this. The medical cost, the economic cost, the psychological cost. Everybody's lives have been completely upended, and that's not just the United States, it's almost the entire world.
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Chris10:10
Let me ask you personally about that. Bill and Melinda Gates, I think it's fair to say, not your typical American family, but how has this virus, this epidemic, how has it upended your life, and how personally are you dealing with and processing what we are going through now?
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Bill Gates10:33
Well, I'm a lot more isolated. The meetings are on our own software, Microsoft Teams. Even friends that I would normally go see, we're doing videoconferencing, which seems a bit unusual. There's a lot of anxiety about how far does this go. We have people at the foundation who feel a bit isolated because they're just in our apartment, some with their kids there feel it's very crowded. So how do we help people deal with this? A lot of people are rising to the occasion, but for me, my life is just completely different. I wake up every morning and think, is this real or was it something I had a nightmare about?
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Chris11:26
Like all the rest of us, do you get scared sometimes, and if so, about what?
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Bill Gates11:34
Well, this isn't the worst case. That is the 1% or so fatality rate when a medical system is not overloaded. If this was smallpox, that would be like 30%. So this is super, super bad, but we will eventually get a vaccine. Even before then, if we do the right things, we will be able to open up significant parts of the economy. Once you're in the crisis, you're just doing your best to deal with it. I'm sure once we get past this, we will look back, understand what we could have done differently, and make sure that we are not letting it happen again, particularly because it could be even worse in terms of the fatality rate.
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Chris12:26
Bill Gates, next time you give one of these speeches, I hope, I trust people will listen.