Bill Gates Calls Out Continued Covid Testing Issues in U.S.: ‘Mind-Blowing… Insanity’

Bill Gates spoke with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria Sunday morning and criticized the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, particularly on the continued issues over testing.

Zakaria started by asking Gates how he would “explain the fact that the richest country on earth, that spends per capita maybe two to three times as much on health care as all the other rich countries in the world, seems to be kind of at the bottom of the pile of the advanced countries in the world in being able to handle this pandemic.”

“It took a number of mistakes,” Gates said. “And I wouldn’t have predicted that we would do so poorly.”

He pointed to a “variety of missteps by the U.S. and then the political atmosphere meant that we didn’t get our testing going,” saying the U.S. is “paying a pretty dramatic price” for not taking the kind of action other nations did.

On the testing issue specifically, Gates said, “It’s mind-blowing that because you can’t get the federal government to improve the testing, because they just want to say how great it is — you know, I’ve said to them, look, have a CDC Web site that prioritizes who gets tested. That’s trivial to do. They won’t pay attention to that.”

He even suggested not reimbursing tests where the result takes too long and reiterated, “No other country has the testing insanity because they won’t talk about fixing it because they’re — you know, they think they need to just keep acting like they’ve done a competent job.”

You can watch above, via CNN.