Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had a lot on his hands in the past few weeks, with the rhetoric of Facebook’s interest in U.S. politics, facing an ad ban from various multinational corporations and dissent throughout the world because of his inaction. However, now the eccentric CEO has finally broken his silence and claimed that he found the government’s response to the virus “disappointing”, stating that the country needs to focus on “beating this virus first.”
The CEO sat down for an interview with Anthony Fauci, an expert of infectious diseases, and said, “At this point, it is clear that the trajectory in the U.S. is significantly worse than many other countries and that our government and this administration have been considerably less effective in handling this.”
Given his track record, one would expect Mark to pull back his punches when criticizing the current regime, but the billionaire was ready to impart some tough love. “It’s really disappointing that we still don’t have adequate testing, that the credibility of our top scientists like yourself and the CDC are being undermined and until recently parts of the administration were calling into question whether people should even follow basic best practices like wearing a mask,” he said.
Fauci agreed with the statement and said that many states rushed into reopening, even though the virus was still nowhere in control, and that led to a massive resurgence of the deadly COVID 19.
Lastly, Zuckerberg suggested that a reset was required, and added that “As someone running a business, I believe the best way to improve both public health and economic opportunity in this country is to focus on beating this virus first.”
This interview comes just one day after Facebook took a U turn on its ‘social networks should not be the arbiters of truth’ stance, and announced a separate section on its app for providing facts about the coronavirus, taking WHO data as the input.
To help keep everyone safe and informed, we’re putting alerts at the top of @facebookapp and @instagram to remind people to wear masks. We’ve already done this in the US and will expand internationally this week.
— Facebook (@Facebook) July 15, 2020
To further limit the spread of misinformation, we’re also launching Facts About Covid-19, a section in the Covid Information Center that will debunk common myths about the pandemic. pic.twitter.com/VjzSIEefYJ
— Facebook (@Facebook) July 15, 2020
