Bill Gates, Voodoo Dolls, Conspiracies and Covid-19 Vaccines
By: Robert Turner
Tags: Conspiracy Theories, Bill Gates, Social Media, Fake News, Coronavirus

The dangers of predicting the future

Why has Microsoft’s founder, one of the wealthiest people on the planet and a huge benefactor of the global health industry suddenly achieved pariah status, almost overnight?

It all stems back to a Ted Talk Mr. Gates gave in 2015. He made a prediction, one that proved more than a little prescient and a prediction which has now come back to haunt him in a way he couldn’t possibly have envisaged.

During the Ted Talk, he discusses the greatest threat to mankind over the coming decades as being a viral threat, likely to kill millions and one that we needed to prepare for. In his own words;

“If anything kills over 10 million people over the next few decades, it is likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than war,”

His statement drew only lukewarm attention from the global media at the time. Many saw it simply as a scaremongering and the talk was mostly forgotten.

Then Covid arrived.

If you haven’t watched the Ted Talk it’s worth a few minutes of your time. 64 million people who flocked to the video after the outbreak would seem to agree. Of course, as people are inclined to do, rather than credit Gates with foresight, the conspiracy crowd got stuck in.

By stuck in, I really do mean stuck in.

According to a recent BBC article, theories falsely linking Bill Gates to the coronavirus were mentioned 1.2 million times on television or social media between February and April. This was according to a study by The New York Times and Zignal Labs and I’m pretty sure they missed a few.

Gates has been at odds with Trump on the Covid virus and has become a high profile target of right-wing misinformation.

Little surprise considering his vocal criticism of Trumps handling of the pandemic.

“There’s no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus,” he wrote in an opinion column in The Washington Post on March 31. “The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of Covid-19.”

The misinformation surrounding him includes more than 16,000 posts on Facebook this year about Mr. Gates and the virus that were liked and commented on nearly 900,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis.

On YouTube, the 10 most popular videos spreading lies about Mr. Gates posted in March and April were viewed almost five million times.

TikTok and Facebook have primarily been the platforms used to spread the conspiracies and wild theories. Twitter has also helped out, but Facebook has played the largest role.

What are the claims?

Screenshot by author

Here are a few of the examples of some of the wild claims posted on Facebook groups and shared millions of times.

Claims that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has tested vaccines on children in Africa and India, leading to thousands of deaths and irreversible injuries. One post even suggested he is facing trial in India.

He is accused of rolling out a tetanus vaccine in Kenya that includes abortion drugs

A video on the website of The New American Magazine’s Facebook page continues with the theme of mass depopulation via vaccines and abortion, and also links Mr. Gates to China’s Communist Party. It was shared 6,500 times and viewed 200,000 times.

A video accusing Mr. Gates of wanting to microchip people has garnered nearly two million views on YouTube.

Screenshot by Author

More than a quarter of all Americans and 44% of Republicans believe that Bill Gates wants to use a Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips under people’s skin, according to a survey from Yahoo News and YouGov.