Billionaire tech legend Bill Gates says testing for coronavirus in the U.S. has been a screw-job thats providing very little value because test results arent coming back quickly enough. Most Americans are waiting several days and sometimes weeks to get their covid-19 test results, something that Gates says can be fixed if the U.S. government simply refused to pay the countrys big testing labs for any results that take longer than two days. But Gates says the government wont listen.
Gates made the comments during an episode of the new Wired podcast Get Wired, and didnt pull any punchesexcept perhaps when Gates used the term federal government at various times when he clearly meant President Donald J. Trump.
Its just stupidity. If you reimburse and you dont care how late the date is, and you reimburse at the same level, of course theyre gonna take every customer. Because theyre making ridiculous money, and its mostly rich people who are getting access to that, Gates told Wired editor Steven Levy about how the testing companies are raking in huge sums while providing terrible service.
You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay normal for 48 hours, and pay nothing [for results that take longer than that]. And theyll fix it overnight! Gates said emphatically.
You can hear the exasperation in Gatess voice, describing how the U.S. government has allowed the country to see the worst outbreak in the entire world, with over 5 million cases and 163,000 deaths. Gates even talked about how he proposed making a new website for the Centers for Disease Control that would streamline test results and monitoring but has been ignored.
Now, you still should have prioritization of inner city and nursing homes and things like that, which a CDC website that we proposed to them early on would just take care of that. But all they have to do is change the reimbursement system. And the fact that the majority of all U.S. tests are completely garbage, wasted theyll clear the queues and only take in things that they can process quickly, because its a screw-job to get late results, said Gates.
The reimbursement rate for covid-19 tests is set by the federal government, under the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services, and overseen by controversial Trump-appointee Seema Verma, and yet no one seems to respond when Gates tells them about his easy fix. Verma has a long history of, lets say, swampy behavior, even before Trump appointed her. And she was recently investigated by a top government watchdog for shelling out $5 million to well-connected contractors.
The federal level sets that reimbursement system and when we tell them to change it, they say as far as we can tell, were just doing a great job, were just… its just amazing, Gates said. This is August. Were the only country in the world that… we waste the most money on tests. Fix the reimbursement, set up the CDC website. Ive been on that kick, but people are tired of listening to me.
Gates famously warned about the threat of a pandemic during a TED Talk in 2015, and has pledged roughly $1 billion for vaccine research, with about $100 million of that going to fight the new coronavirus specifically. But oddly enough, conspiracy theories about the Microsoft cofounder are abundant online, with people claiming that Gates has ulterior motives during the current pandemic.
Some people claim that Gates wants to profit from a vaccine, something that simply doesnt make any sense on its face, since hes pouring money into the development and doesnt stand to benefit financially from its deployment. The weirdest conspiracy theory is that Gates wants people to eventually get vaccinated (once it becomes available, of course) only so that people can be implanted with location tracking devices.
These same theories often intersect with the QAnon movement, which believes Donald Trump is purging alleged pedophile rings out of elite government agencies, among plenty of other things. Many QAnon followers also believe that people like Hillary Clinton have been executed by the state and that body doubles have taken their place, while others, such as John F. Kennedy Jr., have faked their own deaths for the cause. Its all fucking bonkers, but QAnon has become disturbingly mainstream in a way that should disturb anyone whos truly paying attention to the trajectory of global affairs.
The new episode of Get Wired also dives into other topics with Gates, including the recent Big Tech antitrust hearings on Capitol Hill and why Gates says he doesnt want to get into politics. Levy pressed him on this idea that Gates could stay out of politics when the two largest issues that the Gates Foundation is concerned aboutclimate change and public healthare being actively sabotaged by the Trump regime.
Gates really didnt have a satisfactory answer, but it makes sense that some tech-minded people cant understand how important politics is when youre trying to solve big problems. Tech doesnt exist in a vacuum, and many people still dont understand that you need to find political solutions before tech can try to fix anything.
For his part, President Trump continues to defend Americas abysmal response to the pandemic by claiming that the U.S. only has more cases because it does more testing.
More Testing, which is a good thing (we have the most in the world), equals more Cases, which is Fake News Gold. They use Cases to demean the incredible job being done by the great men & women of the U.S. fighting the China Plague! Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
Trump is lying, of course, and while the U.S. does indeed do more testing than the rest of the world, much of that testing is garbage, as Gates so eloquently put it. People need to know quickly if they have covid-19 so that they can self-isolate and not infect others, prolonging this crisis.
You can listen to the Bill Gates episode of Get Wiredhere.read more
Bill Gates Says U.S. Covid-19 Testing Program Is a ‘Screw-Job’ With an Easy Fix
