As coronavirus spreads in Africa, so do Bill Gates vaccine and 5G conspiracy theories
- Conspiracy theorists claim Bill Gates stands to profit handsomely from an eventual vaccine
- Others believe he created the virus for population control – a sensitive point in Africa
As the novel coronavirus wreaks global havoc, Bill Gates is the new bête noire for conspiracy theorists worldwide including in Africa where a Kenyan politician’s false online post has added major fuel to the spread of misinformation.
While Gates’s vaccine programmes on the continent have long provided ample fodder for speculation, the bogus claims have gained new traction amid the pandemic.
On March 15, Nairobi governor Mike Sonko published an old video of Gates warning about the consequences of a future pandemic, with the caption “Bill Gates told us about the corona virus 2015 (sic)”.
While the clip shows the philanthropist telling an audience that the world was unprepared for global outbreaks in his TED talk five years ago, he made no mention of the coronavirus.
Sonko’s post generated so many interactions among his two-million plus Facebook followers that it remains the most prolific global post about Gates in the Covid-19 era, according to social media analysis tool CrowdTangle.
So far, it has been shared more than one million times and has garnered 38 million views on social media.