Republicans think Bill Gates will use Covid-19 vaccine to implant tracking chips

According to a survey, 40% Republicans think Bill Gates is a supervillain who is trying to implant tracking chips into people

According to this theory, unearthed through a survey, Gates is “planning to use a future Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips in billions of people in order to monitor their movements”. (Mint)

Dealing with the pandemic has been one thing and dealing with conspiracy theories about the pandemic has been another. The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds is about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

According to this theory, unearthed through a survey, Gates is “planning to use a future Covid-19 vaccine to implant microchips in billions of people in order to monitor their movements”. This theory has garnered a lot of support from Fox News viewers and Republicans, according to a survey.

A representative survey of 1,640 adults done by YouGov for Yahoo News has revealed that half of respondents (in America) who say that Fox News is their primary TV news source, believes that Gates is out to get them.

The Fox News followers are the largest group responding this way, second come the self-described Republicans and those who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 - 44% of both these lots believed this conspiracy theory to be true. And 26% of Republicans called the theory false while 31% said that they were not sure.

Fox News representatives, the Republican Party, Trump 2020 campaign and the White House and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have not said anything about this survey, or this theory, yet.

Gates has been at the centre of attention for conspiracy theorists partly due to his “high profile efforts to vaccinate people around the world, as well as his recent media appearances”. Gates has also criticised the government's responses to the crisis.

"There's no question the United States missed the opportunity to get ahead of the novel coronavirus," he wrote in a column published March 31 in The Washington Post.

"The choices we and our leaders make now will have an enormous impact on how soon case numbers start to go down, how long the economy remains shut down and how many Americans will have to bury a loved one because of COVID-19,” he added.

An analysis done by The New York Times and media watcher Zignal Labs in April this year found “misinformation about Gates was the most widespread of all coronavirus falsehoods”.

However, Yahoo and YouGov's May survey didn't find that everyone believed these conspiracy theories. “Forty-five percent of independents, 52% of Democrats and 63% of people who say they voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 said they don't believe the conspiracy theory about Gates and vaccines”.

The same survey also found that only half of Americans now say they intend to get vaccinated "if and when a coronavirus vaccine becomes available", 23% of people say they won't and 27% say they're not sure.