Tech billionaire and staunch left-wing supporter Bill Gates criticized the country’s poor performance while claiming that Communist China “did a lot of things right in the beginning” in an interview with CNN.

On Sunday, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked the Microsoft founder, if he believes the accusations that China tried to cover up the outbreak, and somehow managed to “deceive” the world, and should be held accountable for the pandemic. However, Gates dismissed the accusations by saying that the question remains irrelevant, as “it doesn’t affect how we act today.” Gates continued, “China did a lot of things right at the beginning. Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and see where they missed some things.”

The billionaire also lamented about the US’s poor performance, headed by President Donald Trump. He claimed that while some countries were able to avoid “economic pain” by having an immediate response and conduct rapid tests, it is sad that even the US, which you would have expected to do well, did poorly.

Despite Gate’s accusation, it is not just the United States, but the entire global economy which has been massively affected by the pandemic. Even communist China, where the virus originated, saw a 4.5 percent slump on its growth rate and had predictably affected 42 percent of China’s economy, according to the Standard Charter. Even the Chinese Airline industry is also expected to lose $12.8 billion on revenue.

Even London’s Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, or FTSE saw its biggest drop since 1987.

Moreover, studies show that as much as 95% of the global infection could have been prevented if China was able to respond more quickly in containing and mitigating the virus. There is also numerous evidence that proves China had tried to cover-up the massive extent of the virus. In fact, reports cite that the communist country had silenced doctors who have raised the alarm on the first few months of the outbreak. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist from Wuhan, became China’s whistleblower after he warned the public about the dangers of contagion at the end of December. However, Wenliang was immediately reprimanded and died shortly after due to the COVID-19 virus.

Even prominent journalists, Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin, and Li Zehua, disappeared after they released video footage from Wuhan and subsequently uploaded it on social media sites, like Youtube and Facebook. The three had tried to challenge China’s narrative of the outbreak. To make matters worse, China, along with the WHO, initially denied that the virus could be transmitted through human-to-human contact.

In a report from the Atlantic, the media outlet wrote that there had been mounting evidence to prove that communist China had deliberately tried to cover up and suppress the information about the outbreak, specifically in the most “crucial early days and wee.””. “[The] regime imperiled not only its own country and its own citizens but also the more than 100 nations now facing their own potentially devastating outbreaks,” the media outlet wrote.

The country also had problems in terms of data transparency. After President Donald Trump hinted that China might not be revealing the real number of coronavirus fatalities, the communist country revised its initial death toll by up to 50 percent. The numbers rose from 3.869 deaths to a national total of more than 4,600.

The move prompted the British government to no longer recognize the number of fatalities that had been reported by the Chinese governments, stating that they are only producing “fake data.” In a statement from Tom Tugendhat, Conservative Party chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, “China’s data is unreliable and possibly false.”