That’s billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft MSFT, -1.24% co-founder Bill Gates explaining in a “Fox News Sunday” interview how President Trump’s partial travel ban on China and later other countries may have actually worsened the coronavirus outbreak.
“So [the ban] seeded the disease here,” Gates told Fox host Chris Wallace. “You know, the ban probably accelerated that, the way it was executed.”
Trump issued a partial travel ban on China on Jan. 31, with initial reports having emerged late in 2019 of the outbreak in Wuhan, in Hubei Province. (Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had penned an op-ed four days earlier expressing his concerns that Trump’s lack of gravity and serial dismissals of science and expertise left him ill-equipped to manage an effective national response to a health crisis that Biden feared would grow to pandemic status, as occurred formally some six weeks later.) He followed up with more bans in February and March that covered Europe and other hot spots. The president often points to the bans as evidence of his prompt response. Read more…..
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The massive coronavirus outbreak has raised the question: Could anyone have seen this coming? Billionaire Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates did – publicly warning in 2015 that most countries are unprepared for the real probability of an infectious pandemic, and asserting “if anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than a war.”
