Those online who question the push for a global coronavirus vaccination are conspiracy theorists and are “so crazy,” Bill Gates said during an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. (See below)
These days, the tech billionaire now focuses more on his philanthropic foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is heavily investing in finding and distributing a coronavirus vaccine.
The interviewer, Erik Schatzker, said, “The conspiracy theorists who believe that you helped to create and spread the coronavirus might be easy to dismiss – if there weren’t so many of them.” Then he asked whether the criticism was affecting the work of the Gates’ foundation.
“Well it’s so crazy to suggest the opposite, which is… you know, we make vaccines, and that has saved millions of lives, to somehow say that the vaccine, in general, is malign or that — you know, the deaths are really taking place,” Gates answered.
He claimed these are falsehoods and that they spread faster than the truth. Gates also commented on social media platforms and speculated about the whey they should allow people to talk about such things.
“…And the idea of how should these social media platforms try and avoid being the source. These sort of weirdly interesting falsehoods. That’s a debate or discussion we’re going to have to continue to have,” he said.
Yet, in the same interview where Gates encouraged people to trust in the vaccine process, he said people should not necessarily trust the CDC and FDA. This is particularly odd since social media platforms use the guidelines of these organizations to decide which conversations to censor online. He argued that these two organizations, which were once highly trusted, are politicizing the pandemic.
“Any suggestion a politician helped create the vaccine, or it’s faster because a politician is a very dangerous thing,” Gates explained.
“I think within the FDA, there’s a lot of professionals. Historically, just like the CDC, was viewed as the best in the world, the FDA had that same reputation as a top-notch regulator. But there’s been some cracks with some of the things they’ve said at the commissioner level,” Gates added.
“Thank goodness that we have this private-sector expertise that we want to shape into a global public good that gets to everybody on the planet.”
