Bill Gates said he warned Trump about the dangers of a pandemic in December 2016 before he took office

• Bill Gates warned president-elect Trump right before he took office about the dangers of a pandemic, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
• Gates met with Trump and other 2016 candidates, telling them to make preparedness a top priority for the country, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Gates has been warning people for years about the threat posed by infectious diseases, calling outbreaks a bigger threat than nuclear war.
• The billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder's foundation has put more than $300 million into coronavirus response efforts.
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In December 2016, Bill Gates warned President Donald Trump about the threat posed to the US by pandemics, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

During a meeting at Trump Tower with the then president-elect, Gates discussed the dangers of infectious diseases and urged Trump to prioritize the country's preparedness efforts — advice he personally gave to other 2016 presidential candidates as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Gates' pitch for more public-health investment wasn't a new one by that point, either. In a 2015 TED Talk, Gates said viruses pose the "greatest risk of global catastrophe" relative to other threats.

"If anything kills over 10 million people over the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes," Gates said in the talk, adding that countries have spent massive amounts of money on avoiding nuclear war but hardly anything on "systems to stop epidemics."

Despite his push with the public and with public officials, Gates told The Wall Street Journal: "I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger."

The philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder's charity, the Gates Foundation, has committed more than $300 million in funding to coronavirus relief efforts.

Gates wasn't alone in his fears about infectious diseases — public health officials, the US intelligence community, and officials from the outgoing Obama administration have all tried to call attention to the threat.

Trump has faced sharp criticism for steps he took before the coronavirus pandemic, including slashing agencies and government programs responsible for detecting and responding to epidemics and ignoring multiple warnings of a potential outbreak, as well as publicly downplaying the threat posed by COVID-19 even after it had spread widely in the US and botching the country's early response.

The US has become the center of the pandemic, with more than 1.3 million confirmed cases and nearly 80,000 deaths.

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