Bill Gates’s plan to tackle a possible pandemic only works if governments handle health care

The Covid-19 epidemic has yet to go global, yet there are fears among public health professionals it could be our century’s Spanish flu. For years the public health community has been saying two important things in this respect: One, that it was only a matter of time before a serious pandemic hit again; and two, that the global health systems were woefully unprepared to tackle the emergency. A clear lesson is the risk of having the markets set the price of health care, and individual companies handle the service.