Bill Gates didn’t start the coronavirus – why all those crazy conspiracy theories are completely nuts, whatever Fox News says
Conservative pundits like Laura Ingraham and former Trump staffer Roger Stone are feeding fringe conspiracy theories that the Microsoft billionaire not only predicted, but profits from Covid-19 – without a shred of coherent evidence
Bill Gates has advocated for pandemic preparedness for years and famously gave a TED talk in 2015 that warned of the potentially staggering death toll a worldwide pandemic could create.
As the coronavirus has spread around the world, Gates has pledged US$250 million to fight the disease and create a vaccine.
Incredibly, it's these two factors that provide the foundation of a new set of conspiracy theories that point to Gates as the origin of coronavirus – wild ideas that have rapidly gone from fringe online conspiracy theorists to the mouths of conservative pundits.
Here's what we actually know.
In 2015, Bill Gates gave a TED talk titled, ‘The next outbreak? We're not ready’
In his 2015 TED talk, Gates examined the Ebola outbreak that killed thousands of people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. He highlighted the factors that kept the disease from spreading worldwide, and warned against the potential for a much more contagious, worldwide pandemic.
“The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola,” he said. “You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane, or they go to a market.”
Indeed, that is exactly the case with the novel coronavirus – symptoms of the disease don't necessarily manifest for up to 14 days, and potentially longer.
Citing that talk, and the Gates Foundation's US$250 million contribution to fight the disease, some right-wing conspiracy theorists claim Gates is the mastermind that created the novel coronavirus.
The conspiracy theories connecting Gates to coronavirus started in late January, according to a recent New York Times investigation, with a “YouTube personality linked to QAnon” who claimed Gates had prior knowledge of the coronavirus pandemic.