The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an all hands on deck response from many business owners. Among the most prominent CEO’s looking to help was Bill Gates.
Thanks to the Conservative push to minimize the effect of the pandemic, Gates became a frequent target for Fox News. Gates appeared on Ari Melber’s MSNBC show on Wednesday and responded to the frequent criticism.
Melber first played a video of Laura Ingraham mocking Gates’ push for contact tracing. When asked for his thoughts, Gates said, “Contact tracing was incredibly beneficial in places like South Korea. We have had hundreds of thousands of people alive today in the U.S. If we had done that. The data, you don’t have to give up your personal data. That’s not a fair way of describing it. Some societies really chose to make that work.”
Bill Gates responds to Laura Ingraham’s lies about the COVID-19 pandemic. pic.twitter.com/n9Bm03ysQZ
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) January 28, 2021
The billionaire later talked about the criticism levied against both him and Dr. Anthony Fauci. He told Melber:
“Yeah, so, both myself and Dr. Fauci have featured in conspiracy theories. One says that Dr. Fauci is trying to make money off of these vaccines and various negative things about me. You know, there, you’re encouraging people not to trust the advice on masks or taking the vaccine. And that could be damaging. It’s a new phenomenon. I don’t know, will it hurt the vaccine uptake, where everyone who takes the vaccine is not just protecting themselves, but reducing their transmission to other people, and allowing society to get back to normal. It’s a completely unexpected phenomenon, and sadly, a lot of it is based on false information.”
Todd Neikirk is a New Jersey based politics and technology writer. His work has been featured in psfk.com, foxsports.com and hillreporter.com. He enjoys sports, politics, comic books and spending time at the shore with his family.
