Bill Gates thinks Trump’s travel bans might have sped up the COVID-19 pandemic

[Andy Meek]

• In an interview airing with President Trump's favorite TV network this weekend, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates tells Fox News' Chris Wallace that Trump's travel bans earlier this year might have actually worsened the coronavirus pandemic.
• That's because the bans created a rush from arriving travelers that the US wasn't prepared for from a coronavirus testing standpoint, for example.
• President Trump repeatedly touts the implementation of the travel bans on the campaign trail as one of his administration's most impactful steps taken in response to the pandemic.

Given how hard the US has been hit so far during the coronavirus pandemic -- with more than 6.7 million cases having been recorded in the US, along with almost 200,000 deaths, per the team at Johns Hopkins University -- it's to be expected that his Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden is hitting President Trump hard and repeatedly on the campaign trail for the administration's response to the virus. Among the actions Trump officials took in response to the virus was the launch of Operation Warp Speed, which Trump himself highlights repeatedly as the kind of Manhattan Project-style marshaling of resources to bring a coronavirus vaccine to fruition as quickly as possible.

Another of the steps Trump approved in the early days of the pandemic is something else he touts often on the campaign trail -- his implementation of travel bans, shutting the US border to visitors from both China, where the COVID-19 virus originated, as well as Europe. Those bans saved lives, the president tells crowds over and over again -- while, in a new interview airing this weekend on the president's favorite TV network Fox News, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates counters that they may actually have had the opposite effect.

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Bill Gates thinks Trump’s travel bans might have sped up the COVID-19 pandemic originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 18 Sep 2020 at 18:21:39 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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