OPINION:
Bill Gates, in a recent interview, suggested President Donald Trump’s look to Easter as the time of America’s economic restart was medically irresponsible, and that better to soothe the savage coronavirus beast be to do the opposite — shutter business and shut up residents at home for a coupla, few, few dozen more weeks.
And then he waxed histrionically, hysterically, irrationally about piles of dead bodies in corners and so forth.
Puh-leeze.
His words: Shut down U.S. operations for at least six to 10 weeks. Fire up the coronavirus testing for all. And then came this: “It’s very tough to say to people, ’Hey keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner, we want you to keep spending because there’s some politician that thinks GDP growth is what counts. It’s hard to tell people during and epidemic … that they should go about things knowing their activity is spreading this disease,” Fox News reported.
Talk about unhelpful.
Piles of bodies in the corner? In whose corner? Bill’s? Somebody get him a broom.
Gates has been warning about a global pandemic for years — but then again, so have all the globalists. It’s kind of like coffee shop talk for them. The World Health Organization and United Nations have been forecasting pandemic gloom and medical doom on an epic scale for, well, ever. So have infectious disease experts. So have U.S. intel people. And former U.S. intel people. And doctors. And public health officials. And novelists. And psychics.
As Business Insider noted, “End of Days: Predictions and Prophecies About the End of the World” author Sylvia Browne, who was a self-proclaimed psychic, wrote in 2008: “In around 2020, a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.”
Gates didn’t make his widely reported public pandemic predictions until 2015, when he said in a TED talk that the big warning for today’s world was “not missiles, but microbes.” Hmm. Perhaps the National Review, in its just-posted somewhat fawning piece about the billionaire’s positions on pandemic risks, should sub out its “We Should Have Listened to Bill Gates” headline for “We Should Have Listened to Sylvia Browne.”
Regardless, if coronavirus shows anything — it’s the hotly political nature of the anti-Trumpers.
If this virus is truly all the dangers we’re told, shouldn’t the country put aside partisanship for the greater good of citizen health?
Talking about “piles of bodies” in “the corner,” and pretending as if this president only cares about money, not people, does nothing but ratchet tensions and outrage.
Fear and misery should not be used as political tools.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
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