Bill Gates Conspiracy Theories Have Circulated For Years. It Took The Coronavirus Pandemic To Turn Him Into A Fake Villain.
After months of conspiracy-mongering, people around the world are demanding Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity. Here’s how things got so bad.
On May 14, Italian politician Sara Cunial uploaded a video to her Facebook profile calling former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates a criminal and demanding he be tried for crimes against humanity.
It was a speech she made in the Italian Parliament in early May, in which Cunial, who represents a district in northern Italy, claimed Gates was developing a vaccine for COVID-19 to enslave the world’s population.
“The real goal of all of this is total control,” Cunial said, “absolute domination of human beings, transformed into guinea pigs and slaves, violating sovereignty and free will. All this thanks to tricks disguised as political compromises.
Cunial’s speech has been viewed on her page over 500,000 times and shared 30,000 times, and it’s been uploaded to countless other pages on Facebook and YouTube channels. Despite Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers marking the video “partly false," one version of it has been watched almost 1 million times.
Cunial is wrong about Gates using a vaccine for COVID-19 to commit genocide — but she is far from alone in believing it.
The online campaign against him encompasses a myriad of alternate realities created by anxious and isolated social media users, including debunked claims about 5G cellular technology, anti-vaccination rhetoric, QAnon content, and the conspiracy theory du jour, like the idea that sunlight can kill the coronavirus. And it's not just limited to the fringe: According to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Friday, 44% of Republicans in the US believe that Gates plans to use a COVID-19 vaccination as a way to implant microchips in people and monitor their movements.
“We’re concerned about the conspiracy theories being spread online and the damage they could cause to public health,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. “At a time like this, when the world is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis, it’s distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives. Right now, one of the best things we can do to stop the spread of COVID-19 is spread the facts.”
There’s little chance Gates will be arrested by the Italian government — he lives in Washington state, for one — but the backlash against him reflects a very real and dangerous refusal to accept a COVID-19 vaccine if one were to become available. Even before the pandemic, between 10% and 22% of people in countries across Europe didn’t trust that vaccines were safe.
The paranoia around the former Microsoft CEO has been building for months, festering in Facebook Groups and YouTube comment sections. Here’s how the conspiracy theorists, panicked and ignorant people, and technology platforms that allowed the hoaxes to grow turned Bill Gates into the villain of the coronavirus pandemic.
The most popular version of the rumor stems from a tabloid in Ghana.
In 2010, a former staffer with a government health initiative in Ghana claimed that a community health initiative, partially funded by the Gates Foundation, had tested the contraceptive Depo-Provera on unsuspecting villagers in Navrongo, a remote town in the country, as part of an illicit “population experiment.”
The woman making the charge, Mame-Yaa Bosumtwi, was the Ghanian-born, US-educated communications officer for a separate Gates-funded initiative by the Ghanaian government and Columbia University. The program used cellphones to improve healthcare access for women and children in rural areas. Bosumtwi had clashed with another team member, James Phillips, a demographer at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health; when her contract was not renewed, she took her professional gripes with Phillips to the Ghanaian press and filed a lawsuit against Columbia for millions of dollars in damages.
After the lawsuit was dismissed, Bosumtwi went back to the press with a much more shocking claim: Without evidence, she said that Phillips's project in rural Ghana had experimented with Depo-Provera on women as a test run for a broader population control campaign. Patients had been abused. Some had died.
Wanted posters with Phillips’s face sprouted across the country. Protesters mobilized outside Columbia’s research center in Navrongo. Ghanaian health officials called her claims libel, and community leaders and women from the rural area condemned them as false. But death threats escalated so badly that two members of Phillips's team had to be evacuated across the border to Burkina Faso.
As Bosumtwi’s allegations of Gates-funded genocide were spreading throughout Ghana, in 2011 a women's rights group in the US called the Rebecca Project for Human Rights published a report titled "Non-Consensual Research in Africa: The Outsourcing of Tuskegee." The report claimed, without evidence, that unethical medical experiments had been undertaken by US researchers in Africa — focusing on Phillips.
“Researchers allegedly injected thousands of impoverished and illiterate Ghanaian women with a Pfizer contraceptive, Depo-Provera, and administered other unidentified oral contraceptives during human research experiments to reduce population and modify health care," the report read.
The report was written by Kwame Fosu, the Rebecca Project’s chief financial officer and policy director. The Italian-born son of Ghanaian diplomats, Fosu left out a key detail — that he was the father of Bosumtwi’s child. Although that connection might have undermined his credibility if it were made public, in 2013 Fosu released a second report, titled "Depo-Provera: Deadly Reproductive Violence Against Women." The report claimed a massive conspiracy involving international organizations — including the Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, the UN Population Fund, and Pfizer — had pushed a dangerous contraceptive on black women living in poverty in African countries.
"Melinda Gates announces her four-billion dollar contraceptive strategy featuring Depo-Provera as the optimum choice for women of color,” Fosu wrote. “These beautiful females, oblivious that they are being insidiously exploited as diversionary cynical props to mask Gates' egregious intent, are in an unprecedented Depo-Provera campaign with serious racist implications to prevent their very births."
In the US, Fosu’s white papers circulated among right-wing groups that claimed “abortion was a form of black genocide." And they had an impact within Africa as well. In 2014, Zimbabwe’s registrar general, Tobaiwa Mudede, warned women to avoid contraceptives because they were a Western ploy to limit the continent's population. That same year in Kenya, all 27 members of the nation’s Conference of Catholic Bishops declared a World Health Organization–UNICEF campaign to administer neonatal tetanus vaccines to pregnant women “a disguised population control program.”
In the years that followed, the allegations of a Gates Foundation–led black genocide in Africa may have subsided, but the conspiracy theory that Gates could be using vaccines to depopulate the planet has stuck around.
At their core, these conspiracy theories revolve around the idea that Gates is using his wealth to control the planet. As old as baseless claims that the Illuminati or the Freemasons control the world and as new as the digital revolution, they blend imaginary concerns about the hidden masters of the world and basic misunderstandings of science.
Named for the Microsoft cofounder and his wife, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and is the largest private foundation in the world. In 2008, Gates transitioned out of his role with Microsoft to give himself more time to its programs and grants, which primarily focus on enhancing healthcare, reducing extreme poverty, and expanding educational opportunities and access to information technology.
After months of conspiracy-mongering, people around the world are demanding Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity. Here’s how things got so bad.
On May 14, Italian politician Sara Cunial uploaded a video to her Facebook profile calling former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates a criminal and demanding he be tried for crimes against humanity.
It was a speech she made in the Italian Parliament in early May, in which Cunial, who represents a district in northern Italy, claimed Gates was developing a vaccine for COVID-19 to enslave the world’s population.
“The real goal of all of this is total control,” Cunial said, “absolute domination of human beings, transformed into guinea pigs and slaves, violating sovereignty and free will. All this thanks to tricks disguised as political compromises.
Cunial’s speech has been viewed on her page over 500,000 times and shared 30,000 times, and it’s been uploaded to countless other pages on Facebook and YouTube channels. Despite Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers marking the video “partly false," one version of it has been watched almost 1 million times.
Cunial is wrong about Gates using a vaccine for COVID-19 to commit genocide — but she is far from alone in believing it.
The online campaign against him encompasses a myriad of alternate realities created by anxious and isolated social media users, including debunked claims about 5G cellular technology, anti-vaccination rhetoric, QAnon content, and the conspiracy theory du jour, like the idea that sunlight can kill the coronavirus. And it's not just limited to the fringe: According to a Yahoo News/YouGov poll released Friday, 44% of Republicans in the US believe that Gates plans to use a COVID-19 vaccination as a way to implant microchips in people and monitor their movements.
“We’re concerned about the conspiracy theories being spread online and the damage they could cause to public health,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told BuzzFeed News. “At a time like this, when the world is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis, it’s distressing that there are people spreading misinformation when we should all be looking for ways to collaborate and save lives. Right now, one of the best things we can do to stop the spread of COVID-19 is spread the facts.”
There’s little chance Gates will be arrested by the Italian government — he lives in Washington state, for one — but the backlash against him reflects a very real and dangerous refusal to accept a COVID-19 vaccine if one were to become available. Even before the pandemic, between 10% and 22% of people in countries across Europe didn’t trust that vaccines were safe.
The paranoia around the former Microsoft CEO has been building for months, festering in Facebook Groups and YouTube comment sections. Here’s how the conspiracy theorists, panicked and ignorant people, and technology platforms that allowed the hoaxes to grow turned Bill Gates into the villain of the coronavirus pandemic.
The most popular version of the rumor stems from a tabloid in Ghana.
In 2010, a former staffer with a government health initiative in Ghana claimed that a community health initiative, partially funded by the Gates Foundation, had tested the contraceptive Depo-Provera on unsuspecting villagers in Navrongo, a remote town in the country, as part of an illicit “population experiment.”
The woman making the charge, Mame-Yaa Bosumtwi, was the Ghanian-born, US-educated communications officer for a separate Gates-funded initiative by the Ghanaian government and Columbia University. The program used cellphones to improve healthcare access for women and children in rural areas. Bosumtwi had clashed with another team member, James Phillips, a demographer at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health; when her contract was not renewed, she took her professional gripes with Phillips to the Ghanaian press and filed a lawsuit against Columbia for millions of dollars in damages.
After the lawsuit was dismissed, Bosumtwi went back to the press with a much more shocking claim: Without evidence, she said that Phillips's project in rural Ghana had experimented with Depo-Provera on women as a test run for a broader population control campaign. Patients had been abused. Some had died.
Wanted posters with Phillips’s face sprouted across the country. Protesters mobilized outside Columbia’s research center in Navrongo. Ghanaian health officials called her claims libel, and community leaders and women from the rural area condemned them as false. But death threats escalated so badly that two members of Phillips's team had to be evacuated across the border to Burkina Faso.
As Bosumtwi’s allegations of Gates-funded genocide were spreading throughout Ghana, in 2011 a women's rights group in the US called the Rebecca Project for Human Rights published a report titled "Non-Consensual Research in Africa: The Outsourcing of Tuskegee." The report claimed, without evidence, that unethical medical experiments had been undertaken by US researchers in Africa — focusing on Phillips.
“Researchers allegedly injected thousands of impoverished and illiterate Ghanaian women with a Pfizer contraceptive, Depo-Provera, and administered other unidentified oral contraceptives during human research experiments to reduce population and modify health care," the report read.
The report was written by Kwame Fosu, the Rebecca Project’s chief financial officer and policy director. The Italian-born son of Ghanaian diplomats, Fosu left out a key detail — that he was the father of Bosumtwi’s child. Although that connection might have undermined his credibility if it were made public, in 2013 Fosu released a second report, titled "Depo-Provera: Deadly Reproductive Violence Against Women." The report claimed a massive conspiracy involving international organizations — including the Gates Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development, the UN Population Fund, and Pfizer — had pushed a dangerous contraceptive on black women living in poverty in African countries.
"Melinda Gates announces her four-billion dollar contraceptive strategy featuring Depo-Provera as the optimum choice for women of color,” Fosu wrote. “These beautiful females, oblivious that they are being insidiously exploited as diversionary cynical props to mask Gates' egregious intent, are in an unprecedented Depo-Provera campaign with serious racist implications to prevent their very births."
In the US, Fosu’s white papers circulated among right-wing groups that claimed “abortion was a form of black genocide." And they had an impact within Africa as well. In 2014, Zimbabwe’s registrar general, Tobaiwa Mudede, warned women to avoid contraceptives because they were a Western ploy to limit the continent's population. That same year in Kenya, all 27 members of the nation’s Conference of Catholic Bishops declared a World Health Organization–UNICEF campaign to administer neonatal tetanus vaccines to pregnant women “a disguised population control program.”
In the years that followed, the allegations of a Gates Foundation–led black genocide in Africa may have subsided, but the conspiracy theory that Gates could be using vaccines to depopulate the planet has stuck around.
At their core, these conspiracy theories revolve around the idea that Gates is using his wealth to control the planet. As old as baseless claims that the Illuminati or the Freemasons control the world and as new as the digital revolution, they blend imaginary concerns about the hidden masters of the world and basic misunderstandings of science.
Named for the Microsoft cofounder and his wife, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 and is the largest private foundation in the world. In 2008, Gates transitioned out of his role with Microsoft to give himself more time to its programs and grants, which primarily focus on enhancing healthcare, reducing extreme poverty, and expanding educational opportunities and access to information technology.