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Talk show host and comedian John Oliver tackled quite a serious topic in the latest episode of his late night show on Sunday regarding the possibility of the next pandemic.
The Last Week Tonight host addressed the probability of another pandemic and how the world should be preparing to prevent it from happening.
“Now might be the most important time talk about this because scientists attempted to warn us about the ‘next’ pandemic long before the current one hit, and we didn’t really listen,” said Oliver.
Oliver then proceeded to show a clip from 60 Minutes from back in 2004, just when the SARS epidemic was contained, in which a disease ecologist said another disease far worse than SARS would come up and “wipe out people as it moves along.”
“If we’re not very careful, the next pandemic could be even worse,” said Oliver as he played footage of another expert claiming multiple “viruses currently circulating in wildlife [that] kill 60 to 70 percent of the people they infect. … This is not by any stretch of the imagination the worst Mother Nature has to offer us.”
He remarked: “When you put all this together, it does being to seem like we’re actively trying to start pandemics.”
The comedian then joked about how we can prevent it from occurring: “The most effective way would be to close down all wildlife markets, ban factory farming, stop eating meat altogether, halt deforestation, shut down all state fairs and definitely take away Paris Hilton’s kinkajou. But obviously, none of those are going to happen,” he said. “Draconian measures are just not going to work.”
“So for the good of future generations — and in all likelihood, us in a few years’ time — we really need to remember how we feel right now and invest accordingly, because the truth is you never know where the next pandemic is going to come from,” he added.