Trump Nods Along as Bill Gates Touts Vaccines at White House Tech Dinner
Bill Gates did not hesitate to push vaccines and global health during a White House dinner on Thursday night, leaving MAGA influencers furious as President Donald Trump nodded along just hours after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endured a bruising Senate hearing over his leadership of the CDC.
The president invited a glittering line-up of Silicon Valley leaders to the State Dining Room, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, to discuss artificial intelligence. Former First Buddy Elon Musk was noticeably absent.
But it was Gates who stole the spotlight when Trump asked him to address the room.
Gates declared he was in the “second phase” of his career, focusing on “areas like vaccines or gene editing.”
He continued: “We don’t need new science” to eradicate polio, but heralded Trump’s past pandemic vaccine drive when adding on diseases like HIV and sickle-cell, “we do need new science, but the U.S. has the seeds, the same that ‘Warp Speed’ took those seeds and put them together.”
The Microsoft co-founder pressed his case for using artificial intelligence to expand healthcare access, telling the audience: “The work being done by the people at this table is changing the world.”
Trump nodded along cautiously.
Some MAGA influencers raged that Gates, long a lightning rod for conspiracy theories around vaccines, had been given a spotlight at all:
Just hours earlier, Kennedy had been hammered by both parties in a Senate Finance Committee hearing. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) accused him of having a “reckless disregard for science,” warning: “Robert Kennedy’s primary interest is taking vaccines away from Americans.”
Kennedy, defiant, shot back that the CDC had failed in its mission.
“We are the sickest country in the world,” he said. “That’s why we need to fire people at CDC. They did not do their job.”
Watch above via C-SPAN.
