(The Cornell Alliance for Science is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.) The virus escaped from a Chinese lab The spread of misinformation has meant that ID2020, a small non-profit that focuses on establishing digital IDs for poorer people around the world, has had to call in the FBI. Instead some have spread the myth that Gates wants to use a vaccination program to implant digital microchips that will somehow track and control people. But anti-vaxxers don’t believe vaccines work. There is some truth in this, of course: vaccinating much of the world’s population may well be the only way to avoid an eventual death toll in the tens of millions. According to the New York Times, anti-vaxxers, members of QAnon and right-wing pundits have seized on a video of a 2015 Ted talk given by Gates - where he discussed the Ebola outbreak and warned of a new pandemic - to bolster their claims he had foreknowledge of the COVID pandemic or even purposely caused it.Ī recent variant of this conspiracy theory, particularly beloved by anti-vaccination activists, is the idea that COVID is part of a dastardly Gates-led plot to vaccinate the world’s population. Many of these plots and subplots seem to involve Bill Gates, who became a new target of disinformation after gently criticizing the defunding of the World Health Organization. Most conspiracy theories, like the viruses they resemble, constantly mutate and have several variants circulating at any one time. Even so, this conspiracy theory - after being spread by celebrities with big social media followings - has led to cellphone towers being set on fire in the UK and elsewhere.
It’s worth repeating, as the World Health Organization (WHO) points out, that viruses cannot travel on mobile networks, and that COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in many countries that do not have 5G networks. Cue a viral meme linking the two, avidly promoted by anti-vaccine activists who have long been spreading fears about electromagnetic radiation, egged on by the Kremlin. But that isn’t really the point - conspiracy theories are enticing because they often link two things which at first might appear be correlated in this case, the rapid rollout of 5G networks was taking place at the same time the pandemic hit. The latter are waves/photons, while the former are biological particles composed of proteins and nucleic acids.
This conspiracy theory should be easy to debunk: it is biologically impossible for viruses to spread using the electromagnetic spectrum. Here are the top 10 conspiracy theories making the rounds. Conspiracy theories that behave like viruses themselves are spreading just as rapidly online as SARS-CoV-2 does offline. As the COVID-19 crisis worsens, the world also faces a global misinformation pandemic.