ALONG with the coronavirus pandemic, the spread of false news and conspiracy theories has reached expected epidemic proportions. But the role of the main villain, sort of an architect of the pandemic, is more and more performed by a rather unexpected person - the Microsoft co-founder, a philanthropist, and officially the second richest person in the world, Bill Gates.

On the other hand, it's not especially surprising. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, worth more than 46 billion dollars, has been a thorn in the anti-vaxxers' side, i.e., the ones against vaccination, because of their humanitarian work with the development of vaccination as a part of their public health projects. Gates and his wife donated a total of over 45 billion dollars to humanitarian causes. 

All experts agree that for a long-term fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, in the absence of a drug of proven effectiveness, the only solution will be vaccination. Strangely enough, the anti-vaxxers were quite silent about the subject at the beginning. But it was expected that this fanatic and aggressive subculture, which insists that vaccines cause severe diseases such as autism despite the lack of any valid proof, will rise against this vaccine sooner or later. 

"If he plots to kill half of the population, then half of the population has the right to kill him!"

In this case, the anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory has, and we can say it without a doubt, mutated. According to their theory, the vaccination against coronavirus is a diabolical weapon for so-called depopulation, i.e., a violent reduction of people on the planet. That's all a part of mankind's easier enslavement and the establishment of the "New World Order." That insane idea has been present among the conspiracy theorists for decades. Now, instead of the usual scapegoats such as freemasons and George Soros, Bill Gates has become the protagonist.

"Bill Gates says that there's no way out of the quarantine without vaccination with the chip ID2020. If he plots to kill half of the population, then half of the population has the right to kill him! An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! Enough with the terror!" says the post of the Facebook page "Narodni referendum" (the National Referendum) accompanied by Bill Gates's photograph and openly calling for his murder. Other similar posts are circulating on social media these days. The Facebook post is labeled as false news, i.e., incorrect information, as a part of a collaboration between Facebook and Faktograf, a fact-checking page.

The motive for this paranoid construction, which justifies calling for murder, is Gates's statement in an interview with the Financial Times on April 2. "Life will not return to normal until a coronavirus vaccine is gotten out to basically the entire world," he said back then.

The necessity of vaccination is a matter of scientific consensus 

Although all of the world's healthcare experts and epidemiologists agree with it, the conspiracy theorists read a lethal plan from Gates's statement. 

Such misinformation is not only spread by social media sites but also by the new edition of an obscure, far-right Croatian weekly magazine with an extremely paranoid title: "The Final Revelation: Coronavirus is a Global Satanic Operation of Biological Warfare."

It's clear from the subtitle that it's the same theory or a similar theory: "Goal: mandatory vaccination of all the people in the world with expensive vaccines in order to implement microchips so that eventually we'll be monitored and treated like cattle, and not people."

The author of the article is none other than the Admiral Davor Domazet Loso, former Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic's advisor, who has become a Croatian version of David Icke in the last few years.

Sladoljev and Loso also spread paranoia about Bill Gates

Here's also a former CEO of the Institute of Immunology and one of the leading Croatian anti-vaxxers, Srecko Sladoljev, M.D., who made "a calculation" in his Facebook post. According to "the calculation," by converting Bill Gates's name using the ASCII code and summing the given numbers, you get the number 666, which is "the number of the beast," i.e., Satan, according to the Bible. However, there's one minor problem - besides the fact that this calculation is superstitious nonsense: the sum of the given numbers doesn't add up to 666, which Faktograf also pointed out.

In an interview for the Daily Show, a news satire television program, Gates revealed that he is investing money in building factories that are promising candidates for the production of seven vaccines against coronavirus, even though it means billions of dollars wasted for nothing.

"Since our Foundation has such deep expertise in infectious diseases, we've thought about the epidemic. We did fund some things to be more prepared, like a vaccine effort," said Gates. "Our early money can accelerate things," he added.

"Even though we'll end up picking two of them at most, we're going to fund factories for all seven. It's so that we don't waste time serially saying 'OK, which vaccine works,' and then building the factory," said Gates at the time.

However, the anti-vaxxers believe that the so-called microchip ID2020 will be put in the vaccine against coronavirus, whose development is funded by Gates's Foundation and many pharmaceutical companies in Germany, the USA, Israel, and Russia.

It's actually the matter of incorrect comprehension of scientific work, which is typical for conspiracy theorists. Hosted by Reddit, social news aggregation and discussion website, Gates supported "the national monitoring system" as a part of the fight against coronavirus. He also supported some sort of digital certificate, which would confirm that an individual recovered from coronavirus, has recently been tested and had a negative result or has been vaccinated, once the vaccine becomes available.

Invisible ink for detection of the vaccinated people is not "a microchip"

Many analysts agree that this method is necessary for isolating the infected more easily and for contact tracking as well as enabling a continuance of a normal life for the healthy ones and the ones that have developed immunity once the massive social distancing measures end. 

One of the solutions for that kind of verification is adding "the invisible ink," i.e., quantum dots made of tiny semiconducting crystals embedded into the skin in the process of vaccination. It could be scanned by a mobile application that shines infrared light, and clearly reveal whether a person is vaccinated. Researchers of the famous American university MIT have been working on it, and research funded by the Gates Foundation was published in the Science Translational Medicine.

But conspiracy theorists, i.e., Infowars, a web page managed by a controversial Alex Jones, soon turned "the invisible link" into "tracking bracelets and invisible tattoos," and even in "a digital I.D. that combines mandatory vaccines and implanted microchips," as stated in one of the Youtube videos. 

Even Roger Stone, a former campaign adviser of the American president Donald Trump, accused Gates and "other globalists of using the pandemic for mandatory vaccination and microchipping people to know if they are tested." Stone is, by the way, sentenced to 40 months in prison and convicted for lying to the Congress and for tampering witnesses in the investigation about the Russian involvement with the American presidential elections.

"The idea that Bill Gates was involved in the creation and spread of coronavirus is open for vigorous debate," added Stone and revealed another theory about coronavirus being a secret bioweapon, the one that scientists refuted.

Work on the reduction of population growth is not "depopulation"

Conspiracy theorists have nicely connected Gates's funding of vaccines with another misunderstood Gates's statement about stopping or reducing the growth of the global population which, according to this theory, is "the proof" that the former CEO of Microsoft wants to reduce the number of people by mass killing. 

A section of one of Gates's speeches at the Ted Talks conference in 2010 served their needs. If taken out of the context, the section can give the impression to individuals with lower capacities of understanding that Gates wants to reduce the global population by 15%.

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10% or 15%. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3. billion people," says Gates, but the last sentence was maliciously cut out of the video and shared on social media under the title: "Bill Gates confessed that the goal is to reduce the population on the planet."

However, Gates is led by scientifically substantiated theories that the improvement of public healthcare and the reduction in infant mortality in third-world countries naturally leads to lower birth rates because families don't need to have that many children anymore. 

"How do we reduce population growth? By reducing infant mortality. I was surprised, too," he said in a Tweet in 2012. In the Foundation's annual letter and the related video from 2018, he additionally clarified this strategy, which is based on saving lives, and not on "depopulation" using imaginary deadly vaccines. 

Gates explained the strategy in the Foundation's annual letter from 2009. "The surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of childhood deaths actually reduces population growth. Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact, parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve their goal without having as many children," he wrote back then.

Warnings about the next pandemic are not proof that he's guilty

The thing that may spread paranoia around Gates and coronavirus the most is his warning from 2014. "Since I was a kid, I feared the nuclear war the most. But today, the biggest risk for a global catastrophe is completely different. If something kills ten million people in the next ten years, it'll probably be a tough virus, not a war. Not missiles, but microbes. One of the reasons for such an outcome is the fact that we have invested much in the development of nuclear weapons, but too little in systems that could contain the next pandemic. Simply, we aren't ready for the next epidemic," he said back then. 

This is only another proof for conspiracy theorists that Gates knew everything all along, and even somehow started this pandemic. But there's a much simpler and more rational explanation: Gates, along with many scientists, warned about something that we could have reasonably expected after SARS, swine influenza, bird flu, mad cow disease, and ebola. Unfortunately, ruling politicians didn't listen to the warning, and we are now living the consequences - all of us.