Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates questioned whether a Food and Drug Administration-approved coronavirus vaccine would be trusted in an interview Tuesday on Bloomberg Television.
Gates said, “Any suggestion a politician helped create the vaccine, or it’s faster because a politician is a very dangerous thing. We saw with the completely bungled plasma statements that when you start pressuring people to say optimistic things, they go completely off the rails. The FDA lost a lot of credibility there.”
When asked if he trusts the FDA, Gates said, “I think within the FDA there is a lot of professionals. Historically, just like the CDC was viewed as the best in the world, the FDA had that same reputation as a top-notch regulator. But there’s been some cracks with some of the things they’ve said at the commissioner level. Hopefully, the staff isn’t pulled in that direction.”
He continued, “The CDC has been largely written out of the picture because you have people at the White House who aren’t epidemiologists saying what a great job they have done, so it’s no longer a set of experts.”
He added, “These companies are very professional, and the benefits of the vaccine here are very dramatic. After all, not just on the health front, the economic front, the education front, we need to bring this pandemic to a close. Thank goodness that we have this private-sector expertise that we want to shape into a global public good that gets to everybody on the planet.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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