We all love conspiracy theories. This past year has been filled with such theories amidst the global pandemic. The most famous being that the government introduced the coronavirus in 2018, and Bill Gates was responsible.
In January, YouTuber Jordan Sather tweeted a patent for coronavirus filed by the U.K.-based Pirbright Institute in 2015. “Was the release of this disease planned?” Sather tweeted. “Is the media being used to create fear around it? Is the Cabal desperate for money, so they’re using their Big Pharma reserves?” This conspiracy theory quickly gained attention in many conspiracy theorist circles, with QAnon and anti-vaccine Facebook groups posting links to the patent suggesting that the government had introduced coronavirus, presumably to make money off a potential vaccine.
Sather followed up by linking the Pirbright Foundation to Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, based on a 2019 press release announcing that the foundation would be helping to fund an unrelated project to study livestock disease and immunology. His involvement was not particularly surprising. Any time there is an outbreak story with a vaccine conspiracy angle, Gates gets himself involved in it.
According to a Pirbright spokesperson the 2015 coronavirus patent was intended to facilitate the development of a vaccine for a specific type of avian coronavirus found in chickens, which have not been identified as a potential cause of COVID-19. Further, the spokesperson said that the Gates foundation did not fund the 2015 patent, denying any potential connection between the billionaire and coronavirus. But that hasn’t stopped conspiracy theorists from continuing to widely speculate about his involvement, especially following the wide circulation of a 2018 Business Insider article about a presentation Gates gave at a 2018 Massachusetts Medical Society and New England Journal of Medicine event. At the time, Gates presented a simulation suggesting that a flu similar to the 1918 flu pandemic could kill 50 million people within six months, adding that the global public health community would not be able to deal with the fallout of such an event.
Gates’s research was in the context of a wider argument that governments need to work better with the private sector to develop the technology to fight a potential pandemic. “The world needs to prepare for pandemics in the same serious way it prepares for war,” Gates said. To a rational person, this would clearly show that he was arguing for better preparation in fighting pandemics, not anticipating a potential future one, yet on social media, the article was widely received by conspiracy theorists as a globalist billionaire predicting the engineering of a global catastrophe, for no reason other than personal profit.
Even if this theory is completely wrong but it does give the reader something to think about.