Microsoft founder Bill Gates has expressed disappointment with a ‘lack of US leadership’ to fight the Coronavirus globally that led to developing nations like India and Brazil bearing the brunt of the pandemic, CNN reported. Gates in a Coronavirus Town Hall, however, said that he is hoping that the US will ‘step up’ and help get the tools, particularly the Covid vaccine, to people. Gates said that the existing Covid scenario in the US and the world is “more bleak” than he expected.
The billionaire philanthropist said that given there are too many deaths in the US means that the country is “not even close” to doing enough to take on the deadly disease. “The US, in particular, hasn’t had the leadership messages or coordination that you would have expected,” he added. The death toll due to Covid in the US topped the global chart at nearly 26 lakh cases followed by 13.19 lakh cases in Brazil, 6.34 lakh patients in Russia and 5.37 lakh cases in India, according to Worldometer.
Gates, however, has remained the key target of all Covid-related conspiracies, according to a report based on the data compiled by the New York Times and media analytics firm Zignal Labs. According to the report, misinformation and conspiracies linking Covid-19 and Gates found 1.2 million times mention on television or social media between February and April this year. This is 33 per cent more than the second most popular conspiracy that linked 5G technology with the outbreak. More than 16,000 Facebook posts around Gates and Covid were liked and commented on close to 9 lakh times this year while videos around it were shared millions of times, the American newspaper noted.
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Governments and corporate leaders have pledged $8.8 billion earlier this month for a vaccine alliance called Gavi backed by the Gates Foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had pledged $1.6 billion to the alliance. “Not many people outside the global health sector have heard about Gavi, but over the past twenty years, it has transformed the way the world invests in and protects the health of its children,” said Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation had helped set-up Gavi two decades back.
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