Efforts to combat false information and conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus have been almost as strenuous as fighting the pandemic itself. And a new survey revealed that one misleading conspiracy theories about the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is gaining traction.
Conspiracies that suggest Microsoft founder Bill Gates is behind a scheme to use COVID-19 vaccines to inject microchips into the human body floating around. Gates has shrugged off these hypotheses saying that they are “nearly hard to deny” because they are “so stupid.”
According to believers in these conspiracy theories, Gates plans to use a potential COVID-19 vaccine to insert microchips into trillions of individuals to monitor their activities. And despite lack of hard evidence, especially among Fox News viewers and Republicans, the survey found it is gained, supporters.
Misinformation was circulating around Gates’ involvement in a COVID-19 vaccine, and a Yahoo News / latest poll late May found that 28% of American people said they came to believe the conspiracy theories.
Gates, who has aimed his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support medical research and vaccine programs worldwide, rejected the unjustified conspiracy theories in a Wednesday phone call with the media.
“I’ve never been involved any sort of microchip-type thing,” he said, according to an account of the call by Business Insider. “It’s almost hard to deny this stuff because it’s so stupid or strange.”
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According to Gates, 80% of people will need to take the COVID-19 vaccine to work effectively and eliminate the virus. However, more than 20% of people might be against taking vaccines, citing myths of conspiracy against them.
Gates said he finds the prospect “worrying.”
A large number of people have to take it so that the large percentage is immune to it, and the disease no longer spreads for a vaccine to work effectively to block out a virus.
A lot of people believe in conspiracy theories, according to a survey. YouGov’s representative survey of 1,640 US adults for Yahoo News discovered that the conspiracy theories are thought to by half of the American respondents who say Fox News as their primary source of news on TV.
It is the largest group responding this way, preceded by self-described Republicans and “Voted for Donald Trump in 2016” — 44% of both categories said they believed the conspiracy theories seemed to be true. 26% of the Republicans respondents said it was wrong, and 31% said they are still not sure.
However, the survey by Yahoo and YouGov did not find that all presumed these conspiracy theories. Just 24% of the independents, 19% of the Democrats, and 12% of those who “Voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016” believed Gates’ conspiracy theories. Instead, 45% of independents, 52% of Democrats and 63% of Clinton voters said that they don’t think it. The remaining have said that they are not sure about COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy theories.
Such theories cover everything from people’s political interests in reacting to whether coronavirus is as lethal as governments and health department representatives disclosing how and where the virus developed (experts claim it came from wild animals). As many people respond to these attempts, they have also started to read and expanded coronavirus conspiracy theories. So many protesters falsely claimed that 5G wireless played a role in transmitting coronavirus that they vandalized almost 80 cell towers over it in the UK.
YouTube Facebook and Twitter all say they are responding to the conspiracy posts.