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Bill Gates: CDC's COVID-19 Response Was 'Muzzled' By White House

Bill Gates said that the White House “muzzled” the COVID-19 response of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and he offered thoughts on vaccinations and coronavirus conspiracies in a new Wired interview released Friday.

Gates was “surprised at the U.S. [coronavirus] situation because the smartest people on epidemiology in the world, by a lot, are at the CDC,” he told Steven Levy, Wired’s longtime tech writer and editor at large. Gates announced in April that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would shift its “total attention” to fighting COVID-19.

“I would have expected them to do better,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said. “You would expect the CDC to be the most visible, not the White House or even Anthony Fauci. But they haven’t been the face of the epidemic. They are trained to communicate and not try to panic people but get people to take things seriously. They have basically been muzzled since the beginning.”

Pandemic preparedness — a cause Gates has advocated for years — should have been a higher priority for the U.S. government, he said.

“If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic and vaccine platforms, and if we’d done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we’d be dramatically better off,” Gates said. “Then there’s the time period of the first few months of the pandemic when the U.S. actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn’t work at first, and they weren’t letting people test. The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important.”

Gates, who is worth more than $112 billion, has been an outspoken critic of the slow turnaround on coronavirus tests in the U.S. Having to wait more than 48 hours for a result made tests a “complete...

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