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My key takeaways

Against how our govt handled covid:

>> The irony is that this is a president who is a vaccine skeptic. Every meeting I have with him he is like, “Hey, I don’t know about vaccines, and you have to meet with this guy Robert Kennedy Jr. who hates vaccines and spreads crazy stuff about them.”

>> Well, that’s just stupidity. The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing [if it isn’t done by then]. And they will fix it overnight.

Against encryption/free speech:

>> The irony is that it’s digital social media that allows this kind of titillating, oversimplistic explanation of, “OK, there’s just an evil person, and that explains all of this.” And when you have [posts] encrypted, there is no way to know what it is. I personally believe government should not allow those types of lies or fraud or child pornography [to be hidden with encryption like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger].

re: tiktok acquisition

>> But yes, it’s a poison chalice. Being big in the social media business is no simple game, like the encryption issue.




Gates never once said he is against the concept of the government handling of COVID19. He criticized the actual implementation of COVID19 strategy. Totally different thing.


yeah i meant to convey the second one. sorry if you took it that way. i should have said our govt's handling of the virus.


> My key takeaways Against govt handling of covid:

To be fair, there aren’t many governments ‘handling’ Covid in anything like a manner that has been good.


To be fairer, the US isn't just any government. Asides from being the richest and most advanced nation in he world, as Gates points out the US also has the best epidemiologists in the world. One would expect better.


why would you even bring up the topic of being fair about something like this?


I was suggesting that ffggvv could be more fair in their assessment. I do not believe that the average ‘handling’ has been anything even approaching considered or realistic. ‘Handling’ is perhaps the wrong term.


As Gates touches on, trust in public health infrastructure is important to maintain, because when this crisis is over there will still be other diseases which need to be addressed. If people hold public health agencies to unfair standards, seeing them as simply incompetent for problems which are fundamentally hard to address, the inevitable and very dangerous conclusion will be they can't be trusted to handle things like tuberculosis or HIV.




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