Bill Gates: Trump couldn't differentiate HIV from HPV, but was well-versed on Gates' daughter's looks
It turns out that the White House isn't the only place that leaks. During a recent Gates Foundation meeting with staff, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates talked about his two encounters with President Trump, according to video obtained by MSNBC, and Gates showed that he's both surprisingly funny and not too impressed with the current president.
Gates explained that he first met Trump in December 2016, but Trump had met his and wife Melinda's daughter Jennifer, now 22, before at an equestrian event in Florida. "So when I first talked to him, it was actually kind of scary how well he knew — how much he knew about my daughter's appearance," Gates said. "Melinda didn't like that too well." A big advocate of vaccinations, Gates said he tried to talk Trump out of forming a commission to study the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, as proposed by Robert Kennedy Jr. Trump did not seem too well-versed on vaccines, or viruses, he added. "Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HIV and HPV, so I was able to explain that those are rarely confused with each other."
HIV is the virus that causes AIDS, and there is no vaccine for it yet; there is a vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., though many social conservatives oppose that vaccine on the theory that vaccinating teenage girls will encourage sexual promiscuity. Trump is increasingly pushing abstinence-only education. Gates had a parting shot, too, recalling the first thing Trump said to him, and his reaction: "'Trump hears that you don't like what Trump is doing,' and I thought: Wow, but you're Trump."
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