John Oliver on the possibility of another pandemic and how to prevent it

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John Oliver on the possibility of another pandemic

British comedian John Oliver issued a stern warning during his show on Sunday about the next pandemic.

The host of Last Week Tonight spoke about the possibility 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.

He then showed 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."

Oliver commented: "When you put all this together, it does being to seem like we're actively trying to start pandemics.”

He then went on to quip about how we could stop that: "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.