Bill Gates and the ‘new normal’ COVID-19 conspiracy theories: ‘it’s a new thing’ or nothing new under the sun?

ABSTRACT

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019 and the subsequent lockdowns led to widespread conspiracy theories often involving one particular actor: Bill Gates. Adherents of these conspiracy theories believed Gates was behind the pandemic for some nefarious purpose, including chipping and/or eugenics. This was, however, no fringe sentiment: celebrities and other prominent voices articulated some iteration of the Gates-COVID-19 conspiracy theory beginning in 2020. Though the conspiracy theory appears to have come out of nowhere, it does have a (pre-)history. Some have tried to point to a single or recent origin, but it is in fact much older, more complex, and informed by real developments over the previous two decades. This article traces the origins of the conspiracy theory going back to its prehistory in the 1990s, describes the narrative in its various iterations and (per)mutations – along with Gates’s shifting role in them – and charts the dissemination of this dynamic conspiracy theory while examining some of its notable tropes.

KEYWORDS:

• Bill Gates
• conspiracy theory
• SARS-CoV-2
• misinformation
• online media
• popular culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Though culturally salient, this was not the most popular COVID-19-related conspiracy theory. See Enders et al. (2021).

2. For a fuller discussion of the history of vaccine-related scepticism and conspiracism, see Offit (2011) and Mnookin (2011).

3. Natural News averaged over 4 million monthly visits in 2020 (Similarweb).

4. Infowars remains a leading purveyor of conspiracy theories despite being banned from nearly all social media outlets in late 2018. The site averaged between 11 million and 16 million monthly visits in 2020 (Similarweb). Furthermore, Donald Trump has echoed some of its ideas and even appeared on the show as then-candidate in December 2015, when he (in)famously told Jones, ‘[y]our reputation is amazing. I will not let you down’ (Bradner, 2015).

5. See, for instance, comments from an April 2020 video by TLDR News (2020): ‘lookup about rockefeller foundation … he behind the tracking [sic]’; ‘And NO mention of his Globe-trotting with Rocky [Rockefeller], who was a Eugenicist, who Founded the WHO, and One World Government supporter.Too much resemblance to Rocky! [sic]’.

6. A 2018 piece from The Economist (S.C., 2018) that was used by several as a putative smoking gun (Kennedy, 2020b) notes that there were 127 cases of polio worldwide that year. It refers to ‘vaccine-derived’ polio, which is a misnomer as even that variety affects only the unvaccinated. As the piece notes, the injectable vaccine (as opposed to the oral vaccine) obviates these issues entirely.

7. The psychology behind conspiracy theories is complex. For more in-depth accounts, see, among others, Uscinski and Enders (2020), Uscinski (2020, pp. 65–74), Douglas et al. (2017).