Bill Gates is celebrated in the media for the same pandemic warnings that get other people labeled 'kooks'

(NaturalNews) What does the world's richest man fear most?

Something that, were someone in the alternative media to utter it, would invite ridicule and disdain.

Yet few in the mainstream media bat an eye or bother to raise doubts when Microsoft founder Bill Gates says his biggest fear is a global pandemic that could swallow nations and kill tens of millions of people.

In a recent interview with Vox's Ezra Klein, Gates ticked off several scenarios he summarily rated as likely or unlikely to occur in his lifetime that could kill at least 10 million people. Things like a "big volcanic explosion, gigantic earthquake [or] asteroid" hitting the planet – he once believed they might be likely, but now he rates their risk as "very low."

What about war? There is always the fear of war, and especially nuclear war – but Gates said he doesn't really worry much about that, because it is just something that is always lurking out there.

Pandemics everywhere

However, he does believe that there is something looming that will be every bit as bad as a major war – and it's something he does not believe the world is ready for.

"Look at the death chart of the 20th century," he told Klein. "I think everybody would say there must be a spike for World War I. Sure enough, there it is, like 25 million. And there must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is, it's like 65 million. But then you'll see this other spike that is as large as World War II right after World War I, and most people, would say, 'What was that?'

"Well, that was the Spanish flu," he said.

Naturally, Klein – who wouldn't dare make light of anything Bill Gates would say – went along:

No one can say we weren't warned. And warned. And warned. A pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.

Klein goes on to reference a 1990 paper titled "The Anthropology of Infectious Disease," by Marcia Inhorn and Peter Brown, where they estimate that infectious diseases "have likely claimed more lives than all wars, noninfectious diseases, and natural disasters put together." Infectious diseases are our oldest, deadliest foe, they note.

And, as Klein says, they still are.

"In a good year, flu kills over 10,000 Americans," claimed Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "In a bad year, it kills over five times that. [Editor's note: 50,000 flu deaths in a year would be extremely bad, especially considering that the flu actually kills fewer than 500 Americans per year, all of whom likely already had compromised health.] If we have a pandemic, it will be much worse. People think the H1N1 flu wasn't so bad. But more than 1,000 American kids died from H1N1."

Says Gates, as reported by Business Insider: "I rate the chance of a nuclear war within my lifetime as being fairly low. I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, far worse than Ebola, in my lifetime, as well over 50%."

Gates is taken seriously when he makes dire predictions about pandemics, but the rest of us are ridiculed

Fair enough. But why do people take Bill Gates more seriously on this subject than anyone else in the alternative media who has made similar claims? Is it because of his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is immersed in such global calamities like child mortality and the spread of disease?

Perhaps. But a foundation does not necessarily give one credibility; after all, look at the negativity associated with the Bill and Hillary Clinton foundation.

Is it that Gates is so rich? Perhaps – but again, so are the Clintons and many like them.

So what is it, then, that gives Gates so much cred when it comes to predicting a global pandemic than others, many of whom are experts?

Gates' ties to the mainstream, of course. He's a pro-GMO, pro-vaccine, pro-conventional-medicine kind of guy, so anything he says on such topics is going to be taken as gospel.

Sources:

http://www.businessinsider.com

https://theoldreader.com

http://www.annualreviews.org

http://www.naturalnews.com