Bill Gates says he was surprised to be targeted by ‘really evil’ conspiracy theories: ‘I hope it goes away’

Bill Gates said he was “very surprised” to be targeted by a number of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 and vaccines.

In an interview with Reuters posted on YouTube on Wednesday, the billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder talked about being the focus of a vast array of theories about the pandemic, which turned him into one of the biggest villains of 2020.

The 65-year-old business magnate — who has invested $1.75 billion in the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — said that the millions of vitriolic posts shared on social media sites and “crazy conspiracy theories” about Gates and the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, could partly be explained by a combination of a frightening pandemic and the presence of social media.

“A combination that has never been tried before,” he said.

“Nobody would have predicted that I and Dr. Fauci would be so prominent in these really evil theories,” Gates added, saying that he was really surprised by it, and that he hopes “it goes away.”

For a year, since the beginning of a global pandemic that has infected more than 100 million people, Gates has been at the forefront of anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine manifestations.

Posters that read “Gates to Hell,” “Expose Bill Gates,” and “Arrest Bill Gates” are commonly spotted in demonstrations around the world — written in English, German, French, Italian — and they are usually backed up by false claims that the software developer has created the virus to control people, and to profit from vaccines.

The hashtag #SayNoToBillGates became common on social media platforms, next to theories claiming that Gates wanted to use coronavirus vaccines to insert microchips into people, so they can be tracked.

“There’s millions of messages out there where my name, or Dr. Fauci’s name is used. But do people really believe that stuff?,” Gates asked.

“We’re really going to have to get educated about this over the next year and understand how does it change peoples’ behavior and how could we have minimized this? Either working with social media companies or explaining what we were up to in a better way.”

On Wednesday, Gates and his wife Melinda released their annual letter writing about an “year unlike any other in our lifetimes.”

“We all saw firsthand how quickly a disease you’ve never heard of in a place you may have never been can become a public health emergency right in your own backyard,” the couple wrote, in the letter entitled “The year global health went local.”

“Viruses like COVID-19 remind us that, for all our differences, everyone in this world is connected biologically by a microscopic network of germs and particles — and that, like it or not, we’re all in this together,” they wrote.

Looking at the brighter said, the tough lessons taught by the pandemic also have the potential to turn the world into a “healthier, more equal” place for all in the future, the letter reads.