DISINFO: Bill Gates has proposed micro-chipping people to fight the coronavirus pandemic
SUMMARY
In times of coronavirus many cyber-technology companies have rushed into the health sector hoping to make money out of the panic and clamour. For example, a US company has announced that it will use Artificial Intelligence to treat coronavirus patients. Apparently some drugs developed with the support of Artificial Intelligence are already being used for coronavirus therapy and a panacea is about to arrive. Many new Artificial Intelligence companies have forseen emerging trends in nanomedicine and telemedicine along the lines of implanting microchips into people’s bodies, as suggested by Bill Gates.
RESPONSE
The message contained in the article is consistent with the disinformation campaign that various pro-Kremlin outlets have recently been conducting against the Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, accusing him of having created the pandemic or of trying to exploit it for his own pecuniary interests. One of these conspiracy theories is the allegation that Gates and other member of the “global élite” seek to exploit the pandemic to force mass vaccinations and inject microchips into people’s bodies in order to control every person on the planet. The geopolitica.ru article suggests that Bill Gates has proposed micro-chipping people in order to fight the coronavirus - and that US Artificial Intelligence companies are interested in developing this proposal - without providing any evidence to support these claims. Most conspiracy theories about Bill Gates’s alleged project to use microchip implants to fight coronavirus are based on a March 19 article posted on the biohackinfo website. The biohackinfo article misleadingly says that “quantum dot dye,” a technology indeed founded by the Gates Foundation, would be used as “human-implantable capsules that have ‘digital certificates’ which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus”. Kevin McHugh, one of the lead authors of the “quantum dot dye” research paper, said, “The quantum dot dye technology is not a microchip or human-implantable capsule and to my knowledge there are no plans to use this for coronavirus.” The biohackinfo article also misleadingly quotes one of Gates’s remarks made in an interview given to Reddit. In this interview Gates did mention the possibility of having a “digital certificate” for health records “eventually,” but he did not say these certificates would be “microchip implants.” Read here a full debunking of this conspiracy theory accusing Bill Gates. Read a previous case claiming that Bill Gates is planning to use microchip implants to fight the coronavirus.