Bill Gates is calling out the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention over their mismanaging of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During his latest interview with Bloomberg Television, Gates took aim at FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn after he incorrectly promoted the benefits of blood plasma as a COVID-19 treatment by incorrectly assessing the findings in a Mayo Clinic study.
“We saw with the completely bungled plasma statements that when you start pressuring people to say optimistic things, they go completely off the rails. The FDA lost a lot of credibility there,” Gates said.
“Historically, just like the CDC was viewed as the best in the world, the FDA had that same reputation as a top-notch regulator,” he went on to say. “But there’s been some cracks with some of the things they’ve said at the commissioner level.”
Gates criticized nearly every aspect of how the outbreak has been handled, from the time in which it takes to receive COVID-19 results to the CDC revising the guidelines for when someone should be tested.
“You know, this has been a mismanaged situation every step of the way,” he said. “It’s shocking. It’s unbelievable — the fact that we would be among the worst in the world.”
In March, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $50 million to 12 pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms to create an affordable and accessible coronavirus vaccine.
