Back in April, Bill Gates warned that the United States could be facing a “nightmare scenario” with the coronavirus pandemic, but offered some hope that “we should be able to get out of this with the death number well short of” the projections “if we do the social distancing properly.”

Since then, Gates has been critical of the U.S. response, including serious ongoing issues with testing and saying the credibility of the CDC and FDA have been hurt, and even arguing that the travel ban President Donald Trump has touted in cracking down early during the pandemic may have made things worse.

In a new interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd — taped for this Sunday’s Meet the Press — Gates warned, “There are lots of additional deaths coming if we don’t get our act together.”

He slammed continued delays in testing results and said, “We are running the worst testing system, in terms of who gets access to it, of any country.”

Gates added it’s “not that hard to fix”:

“You do have to admit that you haven’t done a good job, and make some straightforward changes. In that case, just the way the reimbursement is done is crazy. So there is an ability to, in terms of leadership that helps with the right behaviors, to protect people. We can still do a lot better. Other than funding research, we fall very low in terms of… the quality of our response, which is the opposite of what you would’ve expected. And so there’ll be a lot of work in the post-mortem. Why didn’t we pay attention to the warnings? Why did we de-staff the positions that would’ve worked in these areas? But, you know, just trying to assess blame is not what the focus should be now. The focus should be now is get the diagnostics right.”

He alluded to political pressure on the FDA to produce a vaccine and said it should get to everyone “with the right message, including get it to the world so the disease isn’t constantly coming back into our country.”

You can watch above, via NBC.

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