Bill Gates ‘owes me one’, said minister

MATT HANCOCK joked that Bill Gates “owes me one” considering “how many people I’m getting his chips injected into”.

The then-health secretary was hoping to get the Microsoft billionaire’s help in promoting an offer of UK expertise in identifying coronavirus variants when he made the quip in January 2021.

At the time the internet was awash with claims that the vaccination programme was being used as a means of controlling the world’s population by implanting chips into people’s arms.

Some of them suggested that the figure behind the plot was Mr Gates, who was at one time the world’s richest man. On Jan 25 2021, Damon Poole, Mr Hancock’s media adviser, sent Mr Hancock a Whatsapp message asking him if he had spoken to Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organisation, about the new variant assessment platform (NVAP), which offered other countries UK expertise to detect and assess new variants around the world.

Damon Poole

Have you spoken with tedros about nvap [25/01/2021, 13:21:35]

Matt Hancock

yes [25/01/2021, 13:52:05]

Matt Hancock

messaged [25/01/2021, 13:52:09]

Damon Poole

No promises but I’m trying to land a Bill gates endorsement of the platform [25/01/2021, 18:52:18]

Matt Hancock

Tell him that considering how many people I’m getting his chips injected into, he owes me one! [25/01/2021, 18:53:29]

Damon Poole

Haha [25/01/2021, 18:53:35]

Many of the conspiracy theories about the Covid vaccine were said to have been spread on the internet by prokremlin outlets.

They included a suggestion that Mr Gates wanted to implant tracking devices inside every human through mass vaccination, and that microchips contained in vaccines would allow Microsoft to “control” the entire world population.

The European Union even issued lengthy advice on how to persuade people that the microchip plot was just fiction.

Mr Gates did not, in the event, endorse the NVAP.