Bill Gates and the coronavirus. The topic of “coronavirus” now has to be viewed from two sides: information vs. disinformation. Social media plays a big role in this.
The most important things about Bill Gates and the coronavirus in brief:
- Conspiracy theory claims Bill Gates is behind the virus
- The patents shown do not relate to the Wuhan strain
- The institute does not work with the Wuhan strain
From this perspective, social media and its participatory cultures promote the spread of disinformative content. Many of the claims are shared by Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter users; the content itself is designed as YouTube videos or blog articles and is often based on conspiracy theories
In our article “ Coronavirus: Fake videos & manipulative reporting ” we pointed out the dangers and motivations of this content and explained its political motivation.
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One of these hoaxes claims that Bill Gates and his foundation are behind the virus as the main financiers of the Pirbright Institute. This claim is available in different languages and is therefore traveling worldwide. German-language blogs also have the report in their repertoire.
Briefly about the content of this theory: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation financed the development of the coronavirus. The Pirbright Institute, which is financed by this foundation as the main sponsor, applied for a patent on the virus in 2015.
This in turn gives rise to the idea that Bill Gates and the institute will probably end up presenting a vaccine and thus making a lot of money from the virus. That's the essence of the claim.
Origin of the claim
The claim about Bill Gates and the foundation comes from the US QAnon area. QAnon is an indefinable, loose source of information that has repeatedly spread false reports or untrue prophecies in the past. These claims were mostly spread across various boards and ultimately ended up on social media and were therefore accessible to a wide range of people.
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These prophecies are usually vague and often not fully fleshed out. Furthermore, it is often inaccurate fear mongering that is simply spread due to the protective reflex of many people. Fear as a driver for false reports.
The website The Daily Dot analyzed various QAnon content as part of a fact check and came to the conclusion: “They don't make very good prognosticators, whoever they are. (They are not very good predictors, whoever they are.).” Various media outlets also note that QAnon's claims are particularly popular among US right-wing politicians (see example here )
Bill Gates and the patent
Here we have another story we know: It's about the coronavirus patent. The coronavirus, which is currently rampant in China and is also spreading internationally, has a patent number that can even be viewed publicly. And behind it is the institute financed by Bill Gates.
This theory contains the error that we already discussed in our article “ The patent on the coronavirus – what’s behind it?” “have described:
There is not just one coronavirus, but an entire family of viruses. Vaccinations against this new coronavirus are still in development, and the patents on other, weaker forms of coronaviruses do not apply to the new version.
The claim that the coronavirus was developed in a laboratory because a patent was discovered on Google is based on sheer ignorance and false conclusions.
This also applies here, because the patents cited as alleged evidence are related to the coronavirus that caused SARS. This in turn is different from the Wuhan strain of the disease.
The Pirbright Institute
This institute actually filed a patent for a coronavirus in 2015. It was about a patent that covers the development of a weakened form of a coronavirus.
In a fact check by BuzzFeed on this topic, employees of the institute have their say who explain in more detail what work they do. You learn that the patent covers an avian coronavirus, i.e. a virus that only affects birds. The institute is not working on a form of the virus that affects humans.
Here again, it is important to keep in mind that the term “coronavirus” stands for an entire family of viruses and each of these viruses has its own characteristics. And here comes the important point that the AFP agency fact checkers have made clear again (here):
Chinese authorities also said on January 5 that the viral pneumonia outbreak that began in Wuhan, officially known as the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV), is not the flu-like virus SARS.
The sequence for the Wuhan virus was released on GenBank, an open access nucleotide sequence database, in January 2020 by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center & School of Public Health.
Knitted together
All of these little threads and dots have been knitted together at this point into a pseudo-evidence involving Bill Gates. This includes the usual helpings of global conspiracies.
Basically, the following also applies here: When it comes to information from sources that are themselves non-transparent and make general claims without evidence, you should always show a certain degree of skepticism and refrain from further dissemination via social media.
References:
Article image: Shutterstock / JStone / Delpixel / Waidelotte
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Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )

