During a discussion about pandemic prevention, Bill Gates made a dry joke about tracking people who use COVID shots. The entrepreneur, who is also the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, has long been a global health advocate, warning about impending pandemics years before COVID appeared and pledging billions of dollars to vaccine development. On the other hand, Gates has been at the focus of some COVID conspiracy theories since 2020, including one that alleges that the virus's vaccine is simply an excuse to implant individuals with tracking microchips.
According to a YouGov poll conducted in May 2020, around 45 percent of Republicans in the United States believe that "Bill Gates plans to utilise a mass vaccination programme against COVID-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID."Only roughly a quarter of Democrats and nearly a quarter of Independents agreed with the statement. Gates has long maintained that the hypothesis is incorrect. During a recent TED lecture, he went after the notions once more.
During his speech, Gates outlined ideas for combating future pandemics and advocated a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization (GERM) team, which he compared to firefighters, to work specifically to detect new disease outbreaks.At the end, TED official Helen Walters asked Gates how he handles vaccine doubters' criticism."Well, it's kind of strange," he said, drawing chuckles from the audience. "Now, the Gates Foundation is highly involved in vaccinations, vaccine development, and vaccine funding. We're quite gratified that tens of millions of lives have been saved through collaborative efforts like GAVI.
"So it's a little hilarious when someone says, "No, we're using vaccinations to kill people or make money or, you know, we triggered the epidemic..." Even bizarre things like the fact that I want to trace the whereabouts of persons because I'm so desperate to know where everyone is. I don't know what I'll do with that information."As the pandemic draws to a close, Gates hopes that people will become "more sensible" about vaccines.
This isn't the first time Gates has dismissed conspiracy ideas this year. Gates remarked on Twitter in January, during an interview with Devi Sridhar, head of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh: "People like you and me, as well as [Anthony] Fauci, have been the recipients of a great deal of misinformation. That surprised me. Some of it makes no sense to me, like me putting chips in my arms—why would I want to do that?"
