Bill Gates paves the road to hell
“It’s not easy being a regular multi-billionaire,” says Toby Green. Until recently Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, was just “the guy in the mansion next door”. Then came the pandemic, and he became “the point at which all conspiracy theories meet”. Gates has since been accused of planning the whole for his own benefit, of seeking to control the world’s population through vaccine passports and microchips, even of being a mass murderer. Gates has not liked that. Judge me by my actions, he insists. Let’s do that.
The New World Order
In his book on the pandemic, Gates tells us what his model is for the world, based on what he feels has worked over the past two years: isolate contacts, close borders, lockdown as quickly as possible, remove restrictions slowly and cautiously. Meanwhile, invest huge sums in public-health systems and vaccine production, and fund a global emergency response unit to monitor outbreaks. The aim, says Gates, is to vaccinate the entire world, twice if necessary, within six months while lockdown measures restrict the spread of the new pathogen.
That may sound reasonable – at least to those who haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on in Shanghai. Six months of lockdown for a billionaire with comfortable gardens and libraries is one thing. For most of the rest of us, it is something else. And it’s something we’d have to get used to. In the past 20 years, preCovid-19, there were already three outbreaks that would surely have triggered Gates’s plan: Sars in 2003, avian flu in 2005 and swine flu in 2009. In each case, enormous fatalities were falsely predicted. The next outbreak can’t be far off, and future lockdowns have been “baked in as the new normal”.
Gates is quiet about the financial reality behind this. Multi-billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is funnelled into research; commercial products are then made and vast profits privatised. An anti-viral from Merck was authorised as a Covid-19 treatment to great fanfare in 2021. It was initially developed as a veterinary drug using millions of public money. It is now being sold back to the US government – at a profit of 4,000%. Meanwhile, shutdowns exacerbate wealth inequalities.
But for Gates, technology is the answer to all problems. The suffering caused by lockdowns he hopes to ameliorate by getting everyone studying and working in a digital world instead. “No doubt he means well. But you don’t need to indulge the conspiracy theories to realise that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”