Coronavirus: Bill Gates targeted by conspiratorial rumors and intoxication

Coronavirus: Bill Gates targeted by conspiratorial rumors and intoxication

News particularly relayed raising the specter of a plot organized by the billionaires, Bill Gates in the lead, to reduce the world population.

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"The Institute has patent number 10130701 which covers the development of a weakened form of the coronavirus that could potentially be used as a vaccine to prevent respiratory disease in birds and other animals. (…) We have not yet developed a vaccine, but research is in progress. "

The patent established in 2015, cited by several conspiracy sites, therefore does not concern a strain of coronavirus which would affect humans. Finally, Pirbright claims that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not fund this patent. Instead, it funds other Pirbright work, such as the study of diseases in livestock and animal immunology. To say that "Bill Gates funded the Pirbright Institute, which has a patent on the coronavirus", is therefore very dishonest: the foundation did not fund this patent on the one hand, and this coronavirus has nothing to do with the 2019-nCov on the other hand.

Conspiracy sites and blogs have not waited for the coronavirus epidemic to spread false information about Bill Gates. "There were exactly the same rumors at the time of the Zika epidemic and during the major polio vaccination campaigns, where he was accused of injecting the African population with the virus vaccine," recalls Jocelyn Raude , lecturer and researcher at the Graduate School of Public Health (EHESP).

For this sociologist who worked on disinformation in the field of vaccinology, history often repeats itself: “We have well-crafted scenarios, which from one epidemic to another are recycled, with more or less the same strings and protagonists. Raude believes that the founder of Microsoft is a "good customer" because his role as billionaire philanthropist, sensitive to vaccination issues, is necessarily suspect:

“He embodies the prototype of the great financier who could contribute to a kind of“ ghost government ”. 

. The researcher had carried out a study as early as 2009, when influenza A (H1N1) appeared: “We wondered what effects neo-conspiracy theories could have, and we had shown that