Bill Gates says Donald Trump’s travel bans worsened coronavirus pandemic
Bill Gates says that Donald Trump’s travel bans may actually have worsened the coronavirus pandemic not helped it.
The billionaire Microsoft founder insists in a new interview that the speed with which the bans were introduced at the beginning of the crisis did not allow for proper testing or quarantines.
Gates makes the claims in the interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday set to air this weekend.
The president issued a travel ban for China on 31 January when the virus was raging in Wuhan, and issued bans from European countries and others with outbreaks in February and March.
"We created this rush, and we didn’t have the ability to test or quarantine those people,” said Mr Gates.
"And so that seeded the disease here. You know, the ban probably accelerated that, the way it was executed.”
Mr Wallace then pushed Mr Gates on if he thought the bans had made the situation “worse, not better?”
"March saw this incredible explosion, the west coast coming from China and then the east coast coming out of Europe, and so, even though we’d seen China and we’d seen Europe, that testing capacity and clear message of how to behave wasn’t there,” replied Mr Gates.
Earlier this week Mr Gates told Bloomberg that the Food and Drug Administration had “lost a lot of credibility” in its handling of the crisis.
Mr Gates has been a vocal critic of the way the US has prepared for pandemics and responded to Covid-19.
“You know, this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way,” Mr Gates told medical news website Stat.
“It’s shocking. It’s unbelievable, the fact that we would be among the worst in the world.”
The philanthropist said that in the early days of the crisis experts from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were in touch with the Trump administration, urging officials to come up with a comprehensive testing plan, and to get surveillance data up on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus,” Mr Gates wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post on 31 March.
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