Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently called the United States government’s coronavirus testing data “bogus” because of testing inequality and slow turnaround, with three to four days to get results.

Earlier in the week, President Trump, during a news conference, came under fire from a reporter who claimed that South Korea had tested more people per capita than the U.S. The Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who was present, defended the president, saying: “I just want to make it clear that South Korea’s testing was 11 per hundred thousand [residents], and we’re at 17 per hundred thousand.” This matches the latest statistics at Worldometers, which maintains a constantly-updated database of coronavirus statistics globally, by country, down to the state level.

Seems there's not enough bad to say about testing, and Gates was out front in that effort.

The tech tycoon had previously taken a swipe at the president for publicly castigating China for its cover-up of the coronavirus.  During a Sunday interview on CNN, Gates not only argued that it is not time to be questioning the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPC) efforts in handling the COVID-19 outbreak, but went so far as to dispel any wrongdoing by the communist regime:

“China did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up. They can look back and say where they missed some things.  You know, some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place, and they avoided the incredible economic pain.  It’s sad that even the U.S. that you would have expected to do this well, did it particularly poorly.  But it’s not time to talk about that.”

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed the CCP for its mishandling of the outbreak, criticizing the country for restricting domestic travel to slow the virus but not international travel to keep it from spreading abroad.  On Thursday, Trump went so far as to indicate that China may have intentionally released the coronavirus.  Based on evidence he claims to have seen, the president is now speculating that the origin of the infectious disease came from a lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the Chinese outbreak.

He said the U.S. now “is finding how it came out…. It’s a terrible thing that happened.  Whether they made a mistake or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose.”

Besides hanging the testing deficit around Trump, Gates had also found Trump’s move to slash funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) a biased mistake:

“In the retrospective, we’ll see things that WHO could have done better, just like every actor in this whole picture.  But the WHO has a strong connection with one country.  That country is the United States.  The number of CDC people who are there, people who used to work for the CDC, there’s no U.N. agency more connected to a country than WHO is to CDC.”

WHO, an agency of the United Nations, has been criticized for its chummy relationship with the CCP, including its role in manipulating a Chinese study that claimed the coronavirus could not spread between humans.

One may ask, why would Bill Gates defend China?  The answer is apparently quite clear.  Gates is one of many executives whose businesses have been ensnared by the Trump administration’s battle with China over technology and trade. In his case, it may specifically be his TerraPower LLC, a nuclear-energy project in China that Gates co-founded.

As reported last year by The Wall Street Journal, TerraPower signed a deal in 2015 with state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. to develop the technology, and, in 2017, agreed to build a demonstration reactor to test the technology in Cangzhou, about 130 miles south of Beijing.  The project was to be the first demonstration of TerraPower’s technology.

Gates’s plan was thwarted last November by U.S. foreign investment restrictions after Trump began taking direct aim at China.

In 2019, under a long-term deal sealed by the Obama administration, a Chinese communist company was set to control America’s second-largest container port behind the nearby Port of Los Angeles.  In an unreported Trump administration victory, the Chinese had to withdraw after a drawn-out national security review forced a unit of China-based COSCO Shipping Holdings Co. (Orient Overseas Container Line — OOCL) to sell the container terminal business, which handles among the largest freight of imports into the U.S. 

Incidentally, Trump was the first U.S. president to place economic sanctions on Chinese companies for their human rights violations — a fact completely ignored by the mainstream media, to say nothing of Bill Gates.  This would give credence to Trump’s belief that that Beijing “will do anything they can” to have him lose his re-election bid in November.

In 2017 Gates was elected as a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), one of the country's top academic institutions.”  The CAE is China’s elite society of technology professionals who have proven their service to the CCP.  But like many other super-wealthy westerners, such as George Soros and Ted Turner, Gates has shown nothing but sympathy to authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.

When White House trade adviser Peter Navarro was asked about Gates’ stunning praise of China, he did not mince any words: “Bill Gates, I’m all for innovation, but we have to hold China accountable and now China is even flooding us with these bad tests.  So, Mr. Gates and I will differ on the need to hold China accountable. That’s certainly the case.  Because the Chinese communist party basically inflicted this virus on the world.  And we should never forget that here in America.”

But Gates saw things differently. In early April, Bill Gates had complimented the Chinese for their “extreme intervention in terms of reducing [the coronavirus] movement — they were able to crush that epidemic.  Those hospitals are gone.  Look at the commerce.  Stores are open now in China and nowhere else, whereas before, it was the opposite.”  This could not be any further from the truth.

Yes, the stores have reopened but only under coercion.  Despite the CCP’s determination to recast the country as a global leader that has conquered the COVD-19 pandemic, such a claim is fictitious or manipulated at best.  General Secretary Xi Jinping, in fact, forged a new mythology of the coronavirus in which he claims that he was secretly managing the response behind the scenes the whole time and was let down by local officials who did not follow his perfect plans to the letter.  China’s Central Propaganda Department actually put this story of how “the centralized and unified leadership of the Communist Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core” defeated the coronavirus into book form and published the book in six different languages.

According to Radio Free Asia (RFA), Xi and his legion of censors are working hard to stamp out anything that contradicts his revised political mythology of the epidemic. RFA pointed out that a major article about an early coronavirus whistleblower named Dr. Ai Fen has been erased. His account is very similar to that of the late Dr. Li Wenliang, who was one of the colleagues she shared her suspicions about a burgeoning epidemic with.

Unless Bill Gates is extremely naive—he is just the opposite — to believe that communist China should be complimented for its so-called good handling of the coronavirus outbreak and that it is a model to emulate is as pretentious as believing in the tooth fairy.  One thing is to gripe about Trump’s policy towards China — Gates’ apparent reason is his own financial interests — yet another thing is to absolve the Chinese government officials’ coronavirus cover-up by praising them, which is borderline treason.

Image credit: Steve Jurvetson, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0