Bill Gates vehemently defended China's initial response to the coronavirus outbreak on Sunday, telling CNN's Fareed Zakaria that the communist country - which silenced whistleblowers and lied about transmissibility - "did a lot of things right."

"How would you respond to the charge that hte Chinese covered this up. They've essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result, they should be held in some way responsible for this?" asked Zakaria.

To which Gates responded: "Well, I don't think that's a timely thing because it doesn't affect how we act today. You know, 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 that they missed some things," Gates said, adding "Some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place, and they avoided the incredible economic pain - and it's sad that even the US that you would have expected to do this well, did it particularly poorly - but it's not time to talk about that."

Gates then suggested that this is the time "to take the great science we have, the fact that we're in this together, fix testing and treatments and get that vaccine, and minimize the trillions in dollars and many things that you can't even dimensionalize in economic terms that are awful about the situation that we're in.

"That's a distraction," Gates added, regarding placing the blame on China. "I think there's a lot of incorrect and unfair things said."

Watch:

Bill Gates claims that criticisms of how China lied and covered up the coronavirus is a “distraction”: “China did a lot of things right at the beginning … they avoided the incredible economic pain … I think there’s a lot of incorrect and unfair things said”



This is all a lie pic.twitter.com/RlbwV0fUcA — Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 26, 2020

We wonder why Bill Gates - one of the largest donors to the World Health Organization - is similarly defending China, which is also one of the WHO's largest contributors.