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Well … it’s technically a passing grade, right?
Melinda Gates, co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, gave the Trump administration a D-minus for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“We need leadership at the national level,” Gates told Politico. She pinned her low marks on the country’s lack of a coordinated response for two months now.
“ “We have governors who are stepping up, luckily, but now we have 50 different homegrown state solutions instead of a national response.” ”
Gates, 55, cited Germany as an “exemplar” country that has testing and contact tracing down to a science. Germany’s COVID-19 case count as of Friday morning was 169,430, with 7,392 deaths. America’s case count was 1.26 million, the highest in the world for weeks now, with 75,670 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
If the U.S. followed Germany’s example, she said, “We would be testing, first, health care workers and then the most vulnerable, and you’d be doing contact tracing. And we would be able to start thinking about slowly, slowly reopening places in society in safe and healthy ways, but we have a lack of a coordinated effort.”
Watch the interview here:
White House spokesperson Judd Deere responded that President Trump has taken an “unprecedented approach” to working with governors to get them the resources they need.
“The White House has been working with Governors and their teams since January on this whole-of-government response, including supply chains, testing, data-driven guidelines for social distancing, and now a responsible plan to open America again,” Deere told Politico.
But several organizations have raised questions this week about which states the government has decided to give the COVID-19 treatment drug remdesivir to. The emergency-use authorization, or EUA, for Gilead’s GILD, -0.15% remdesivir states that the U.S. government controls the distribution of the drug. It’s one of only two types of COVID-19 drugs to get an EUA since the pandemic began. But a physician associated with Boston Medical Center, for example, tweeted that the hospital hasn’t received any doses of remdesivir. “We have the second highest absolute case count and highest per bed in Boston,” Dr. Benjamin Linas, an epidemiologist at the safety-net hospital, posted on Wednesday. “We also had no access to early trials.”
Read more:Infectious-disease doctors ask government to explain how it decides who gets Gilead’s remdesivir
Gates, whose charitable foundation pledged $150 million for its coronavirus relief efforts in April, on top of the $100 million it committed in February, said more money should “absolutely” be put toward testing and contract tracing at home, as well as toward funding a vaccine globally.
Read more:Bill Gates says he’ll spend billions on coronavirus vaccine development
She also noted that businesses are going to have to take child care into consideration before they fully reopen, since many workers have become full-time caregivers and home-schoolers of children as schools have closed during the pandemic.
“So guess what, business? You want to reopen? You want your employees to come back? You better realize they are caregivers of young children,” she said. “School’s out.”
Reopening too soon and getting back to business as usual has been a concern echoed by her husband, Microsoft MSFT, +0.58% founder Bill Gates, as well. Gates recently warned that the U.S. government can’t “wave a wand” and “all of a sudden the economy is anything like it was before.”
