In a September 2020 interview with Axios on HBO, Melinda Gates said “It may be time for a reckoning” with social media’s role in spreading disinformation. According to Axios:1
“Bill and Melinda Gates … [have] seen firsthand the impact of disinformation, as they’ve become targets of conspiracy theories amplified and spread via social media … [Melinda] Gates … said society may need to start holding social media companies to account for their role in helping such disinformation spread.”
It’s ironic, to say the least, considering the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds and influences mainstream media companies, which in turn write whatever the Gates desire, be it truthful or not, without disclosing their conflict of interest.
Through its grants to the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency owned by Publicis, the Gates Foundation is also financially linked to NewsGuard and HealthGuard, as both of these “fact-checking” sites are funded by Publicis. As such, Gates already has the power to pull strings and censor content they don’t like.
Gates Foundation Funds Scientific Disinformation
The Gates Foundation also has a history of funding disreputable and flawed to the point of being fraudulent science. What they call “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” are to a large extent merely information exposing the Gates Foundation’s own disinformation campaigns.
Case in point: The Gates Foundation funds the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis to the tune of millions of dollars per year. The MRC Centre is the leading body advising world governments and the World Health Organization about infectious disease outbreaks.
Neil Ferguson, a professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London and co-founder of the MRC Centre, has produced a string of pandemic predictions that have turned out to be spectacularly incorrect:2,3
•In 2001, Ferguson’s team produced a model for the spread of foot and mouth disease in British livestock, concluding that even in cases where there was no evidence of infection, animals had to be culled to curtail the outbreak.
The projection led to the slaughter of more than 6 million cattle, sheep and pigs in the U.K. that year, costing the national economy an estimated £10 billion. As reported by Spectator:4
“It has been claimed by experts such as Michael Thrusfield, professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, that Ferguson’s modelling on foot and mouth was ‘severely flawed’ and made a ‘serious error’ by ‘ignoring the species composition of farms,’ and the fact that the disease spread faster between different species.”
•In 2002, Ferguson predicted that by 2080, beef tainted with mad cow disease could kill up to 50,000 people, with a worst-case scenario killing 150,000.5 As of 2015, there had only been 177 human deaths attributable to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the U.K., the human version of mad cow disease.6