(Electronic music)
- (Michael) Hey everyone, Michael here. If
you’ve paid even the slightest bit of attention
to “weird things your uncle posts on Facebook”
you might have noticed a hip new bogeyman
in the conspiracy-theory world: Bill Gates.
The Microsoft founder and 2nd richest person
alive has joined the ranks of the Rockefeller
family, George Soros, the Bilderberg Group
and the Illuminati on the list of “shadowy
figures” people would like to blame their
problems on. And as it currently concerns
William Henry Gates III, that problem is Covid-19.
Now, theories about Gates’ involvement in
the coronavirus pandemic come in all shapes
and sizes, ranging from “so bizarre we can’t
even trace their connection to reality”
to “Actual facts, grossly distorted to seem
scarier.” Rumors include: Bill Gates owns
the patent for Sars-CoV-2, the virus that
causes COVID-19 (he does not), Bill Gates
will use a forthcoming vaccine to secretly
implant microchips in us - he won’t, and
Bill Gates is trying to build a global surveillance
state as foretold in the biblical Book of
Revelation - also false, but in a much more
complicated way.
But what I find interesting about the people
behind these theories- those who posit a shadowy
nefarious character that secretly controls
the world with their wealth and influence
- is how they often overlook the REAL and
scary truth that’s out in broad daylight.
And the theories swirling around Bill Gates
are no exception.
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on The Truth About Bill Gates
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- (Michael) Now - to pre-empt a lot of angry
comments: Bill Gates is not only currently
the 2nd richest man on Earth, he is also one
of the single-most generous people on the
planet in terms of the total money given away.
Over the last 25 years, Bill and his wife
Melinda have given over $50 billion dollars
to charity, much of it through the eponymous
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
What’s more, Gates has pledged to donate
the majority of his 100 billion dollar estate,
and upon his death, his 3 children will each
receive a $10 million inheritance, totaling
approximately 1/33rd of one percent of his
total net worth. For scale - that’s like
if your parents had a million dollars and
left you 300 bucks.
To understand how conspiracy theories often
distract us from the very public, not-at-all-secret
bullshittery of powerful people, let’s take
a look at one of the most prominent Bill Gates
conspiracy theories: That he is somehow going
to make the entire human population get the
Coronavirus vaccine, a disease he purportedly
invented, in order to microchip us all for,
again, some vague plot to track our walks-of-shame
to the Waffle House.
This theory falls into the category of “Cherry-picking
a few facts to tell a narrative with only
the loosest relationship to reality.”
And that reality is a thing called ID2020.
ID2020 is a nonprofit organization loosely
affiliated with the Bill Gates Extended Universe.
While the organization doesn’t list the
Gates Foundation as a partner, it does list
Microsoft - a company that Gates only recently
resigned from the board of, and GAVI, a vaccine-advocacy
organization that receives substantial funding
from the Gates Foundation.
ID2020’s pitch is pretty simple: A legal
identity is increasingly a gateway to participate
in the modern world, and lots of people can’t
actually identify themselves. If you’re
homeless in America and can’t prove who
you are with a driver’s license or social
security card, getting a job, social services,
or just participating in society is complicated.
If you’re living on skid row, holding on
to identification in the face of rainstorms,
police seizures, and theft is just really
hard. Now imagine those same problems but
faced by refugees looking for healthcare or
people in the developing world looking to
get a small business loan. ID2020 wants to
fix that with a digital identity system
It’s on the cloud!
Now, even though Bill Gates does not seem
to be directly involved with ID2020, he has
addressed similar issues surrounding identification.
And here’s where the theories start. As
it turns out: medical records are super important.
A constant problem healthcare workers face
in the developing world is wondering, for
instance, who has and hasn’t been inoculated
against polio or measles. And the Gates Foundation,
since it would like to stop children from
dying of preventable diseases, partially funded
research into an infrared tattoo - a quantum-dot
- that could provide a medical record that
can’t get destroyed in a flood or lost under
a floorboard. People living in the developed
world might take for granted how important
medical records are, but every time a doctor
makes sure you’re on schedule for your shots,
or checks your known allergies, they need
reliable medical records. Quantum-dot tattoos
or otherwise, it’s fair to suppose that
Gates believes identification is a key hurdle
in giving people medical care. But you can
probably already see how this quickly turns
into fodder for conspiracy theorists: ID2020,
quantum-dot tattoos, and vaccines got amalgamated
into a scary theory about how Gates was trying
to microchip and track people in some expansive
global surveillance system.
To be perfectly clear, Bill Gates is NOT demonically
marking people or culling the population.
But here’s the troubling thing: plenty of
what he actually does, funds, and believes,
is ethically debatable, at best, and downright
harmful at worst. And this is what makes the
conspiracy theories about him so frustrating.
To figure out why: I want to talk to you about
disease eradication. If you watched the Decoding
Bill Gates documentary on Netflix, you might
have learned about how the man is committed
to valiantly defeating polio and malaria.
- (Bill Gates) You know, this was this big
risky thing we were doing to help lead polio
eradication-
- (Michael) Just a quick definition before
we move on: to eradicate a disease means to
bring cases of the disease to zero, everywhere,
forever - meaning unlike Mel Gibson’s career,
it’s never coming back. Smallpox, for instance,
was declared eradicated in 1980 after a global
vaccination campaign. And while there’s
a few lab samples left, it hasn’t been naturally
transmitted since. Then there’s malaria
and polio. These diseases suck. Malaria kills
hundreds of thousands of people a year, and
before a global campaign against polio, hundreds
of thousands of people were left paralyzed
from the virus. And here I want to say that
I personally believe that A) Bill Gates is
a smart man who genuinely believes he’s
helping the world and B) He might nevertheless
be hurting science and global health policy.
To show why, I want to introduce you to Dr.
Arata Kochi, who is pretty much the Bobby
Knight of public health. Kochi, by all accounts,
is kind of a dick. But he’s a dick with
a good track record - he ran an extremely
successful campaign against tuberculosis for
the WHO before leading their charge against
malaria in 2006. Kochi had a penchant for
firing people, as well as angering pharmaceutical
companies and the non-profits he worked with.
Obviously, among those nonprofits was The
Gates Foundation, which had made malaria eradication
a priority in 2007.
Now, eradicating malaria is really hard. Stopping
smallpox, still no small feat, was at least
easier because the virus can only be spread
by humans. So to track down every last case,
you only need to track down people. The parasite
that causes malaria is a little harder to
track: it spends part of its life in mosquitos
and part of it in humans. So when the Gates
Foundation announced they were going to funnel
money into eradicating malaria, that is, wiping
it off the face of the earth, most public
health experts thought it was a bad idea:
it was neither feasible nor safe, as Sonia
Shah writes in her book Pandemic. Rather,
experts, including Kochi, felt that containing
the disease - was a better use of resources.
In other words, we could spend the money on
drugs, mosquito nets, insecticides and other
measures to drastically reduce cases rather
than expending endless resources trying to
bring them to zero.
Amidst the call for malaria eradication, Kochi,
in a memo leaked to the New York Times, complained
to his boss that the Gates Foundation was
having a corrosive effect on the scientific
process. He warned that the influence of the
Foundation on global health policy had “dangerous
consequences on the policy-making process
in world health” and accused the foundation
of only promoting policies that had been researched
by its own grantees.
In one case, Kochi accused the Gates foundation
of pushing a potentially-dangerous malaria
drug, a policy that JUST SO HAPPENED to be
funded by their own research dollars. Dr.
Kochi wrote, although it was “less and less
straightforward” that the WHO should recommend
the drug, the agency’s objections were met
with “intense and aggressive opposition”
from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation.
The W.H.O., he wrote, needs to “stand up
to such pressures and ensure that the review
of evidence is rigorously independent of vested
interests.” This did not happen: Instead,
the WHO adopted the Gates-backed plan. Another
health expert, Amir Attaran, said his experience
with Gates-financed policy groups convinced
him they were engaged in “stomach-churning
group think.” And what happened to Kochi
for speaking out about Gates?
As Shah writes, he was put on “gardening
leave,” never to be heard from again.
And this is the not-at-all secret truth about
Bill Gates. He’s not a secret dictator with
a shadowy agenda. Instead, he’s a very rich
person who can throw his money around to have
his voice heard. Through his contributions
to the WHO, he’s also buying influence over
their policies. He’s no different, in that
way, from Michael Bloomberg, who in his bid
for New York City mayor famously made charitable
donations to groups that were critical of
him to shut them up, or the Koch Brothers,
who have spent millions of dollars advancing
their pet political causes, or George Soros,
who has done similarly on the opposite side
of the political spectrum. You might look
at the aims of Soros or Gates and call them
laudable, and often many of them are, but
a world where a select few decide what’s
good for the rest of the world basically amounts
to a benevolent oligarchy. And it’s not
a shadowy cabal, it’s just kind of how modern
philanthropy works.
A ton of nonprofit activity nowadays is directed,
in some part, by grants from huge organizations
like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates
Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and also
corporate donors. Looking for good PR, companies
like Mastercard or Starbucks are more than
eager to shell out millions of dollars to
charitable causes. And hey - what’s wrong
with doing a good deed?
The problem, like we saw with malaria, is
that money often has implicit or explicit
strings attached. The countless health researchers
funded by The Gates Foundation, might, for
instance, feel less inclined to criticize
the foundation’s policies or its corporate
benefactors. As sociologist Linsey McGoey
notes, “the fact that the Gateses often
fund initiatives that many people approve
of should not insulate them from criticism,
and to date, that’s exactly what has happened:
gaping silence...” The autocratic influence
on the WHO is just one example, we could also
consider what it means for global health policy
to enforce this top-down model. Consider Gates’
mission to eradicate polio - a seriously cool
idea. But the thing is - polio has already
been combated so well that it doesn’t even
hit the “top 10” lists of things people
in rural villages are worried about killing
them. Donald Henderson, who led the WHO’s
successful effort to eradicate smallpox, has
noted that polio vaccines have come at the
expense of other, more urgent vaccinations.
Henderson recounts interactions with villagers
who questioned why they’re being inoculated
for polio instead of the much more urgent,
and deadly, problem of measles.
So, is Bill Gates doing apparently noble things
in all the wrong ways? Maybe. But his undue
influence hasn’t merely refocused public
health priorities at the highest level. It’s
also led to a lot of other far shadier policies.
James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology
International, argues that Gates uses his
philanthropy to push a pro-patent agenda for
pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that
are too poor to afford many patented drugs.
It’s a position widely criticized by the
public health world. If drug companies had
a little more leeway to produce generic versions
of life-saving drugs, they would be able to
make a dent in the millions of annual deaths
from treatable disease. And while Bill Gates
recently publicly argued that a Covid-19 vaccine
needs to go to those who need it the most,
rather than the highest bidder -
- (Bill Gates) If we just let drugs and vaccines
go to the highest bidders, instead of to the
people and the places where they’re both
needed, we’ll have a longer and more unjust
pandemic.
- (Michael) He has zero interest in tweaking
patent laws against his own interest. Because
he built his entire fortune, and continues
to grow it, with intellectual property laws
that protect Microsoft’s profits.
McGoey writes that his opposition “may have
single-handedly thwarted efforts to open pharmaceutical
markets to more generic competition.”
But there’s more. McGoey quotes NGO director
James Love, who explains that, "[The Gates
Foundation] funds most of the journalism on
this topic, and they have been hardline advocates
for strong patent protection, since the 1990s"
- making an open discussion on the issue even
more difficult. The influence of donors on
the scientific community isn’t just limited
to the Gates Foundation. McGoey tells the
story of David Healy, a psychiatrist who was
offered a job by the University of Toronto
in 2000. He then gave a talk discussing the
limitations of clinical drug trials in revealing
rare side effects, invoking the example of
Prozac. It turns out, Prozac’s manufacturer,
Eli Lilly, is a major donor to the University
of Toronto, and provided over half the funding
to the department Healey was supposed to run.
His job offer was retracted a few weeks later.
If one cares about free and open academic
debate, one has to ask what kind of debate
gets squashed based on pressure from donors.
And here’s the frustrating thing about conspiracy
theorists who see in the shadows cabals of
pharmaceutical reps attempting mass mind control:
If they turn on the lights, it’s just the
regular old free market.
Which brings us back to ID2020. It’s worth
noting that the stated goal of ID2020 is to
create a digital identity for people that
they individually OWN. They’re not proposing
some gross centralized surveillance system.
The truth - the real conspiracy if you will
- is far more boring: -They’re building
infrastructure. If you’re a multinational
corporation like Accenture or Microsoft, a
big impediment to doing business is lack of
infrastructure in the developing world. Microsoft
can’t sell Xboxes if cities don’t have
electricity or internet. Accenture can’t
help companies run data-driven ads if there’s
no data to mine.
And here is the other quote unquote conspiracy
of a ton of corporate philanthropy: it’s
just a tax-free way to build the infrastructure
your company needs. Say you’re a mining
company looking to extract minerals in a remote
part of Africa. You need to transport supplies
in and minerals out, but there’s no road.
You could just pay for it and mark it as an
expense. Or you could work through some charity,
get a grant from the government to “improve
infrastructure,” and get the same road built
for practically free. This is just a made-up
example, but there’s plenty of real ones
that McGoey details, where government loans
for charitable causes just act like venture
capital on a risky new business venture.
Take Vodafone, a company worth over 80 billion
pounds in 2011, which received one million
in grants from the British government to launch
a mobile-payment system in parts of Africa.
The system that would go on to become highly
profitable for Vodafone and their subsidiaries.
McGoey writes, “While most people would
agree that better mobile access and services
in the developing regions is a positive development,
many would also suggest that Vodafone should
incur its own business costs, seeing as the
company and its shareholders have full entitlement
to all profits, minus taxes.” A similar
example lies in microfinance, very small loans
meant to help people lift themselves out of
poverty. After raising billions of dollars
in grants, contributions and government aid,
the real winners of the systems are Western
investors, who reap billions in profits from
loans with incredibly high interest rates.
In this case, governments are subsidizing
the risks companies take, as they build up
the corporate and physical infrastructure
to see if they can make a buck.
And with partners like Mastercard, Accenture,
and Microsoft, it’s not hard to see why
this might be an “added bonus” for donating
to something like ID2020. After all, digital
IDs would function as, well, digital infrastructure,
laying the groundwork for all kinds of business
to be conducted. Even if a person is in control
of their ID, it would allow them to willingly
give up their information to apply for a credit
card, or a microloan, or to sign away their
privacy willingly in some gargantuan terms
of service. And from there, Mastercard can
sell that information to advertisers. And
I want to be careful here, because this is
the one claim I’m making that’s speculative.
But I don’t think it’s a stretch to say,
somewhere down the line, there will be a disagreement
in how ID2020 operates, let’s say over a
privacy concern. When push comes to shove,
the people writing the checks, not you or
I or anyone using a digital ID in Afghanistan,
will get to decide which side wins.
Unlike a conspiracy theorist, I fully acknowledge
that they MIGHT actually establish meaningful
privacy protections. And I also know that
plenty of organizations involved in ID2020,
really do just want a better way to provide
healthcare to people, like the Gates-funded
Gavi. There’s also the argument that, even
if Mastercard IS itching to sell data, hey,
at least all that greed might end up helping
people. But one thing we do know: philanthropy
can be incredibly profitable. Journalist Tim
Schwab notes that the Gates Foundation has
sent millions in “charitable” contributions
to for-profit companies, some of which the
Foundation owns stocks or bonds in, companies
like: Merck, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer.
Swab also notes that, despite pledging to
give away millions of dollars, Bill Gates’
personal net worth continues to grow. In 2006,
he was worth $50 billion, today, he’s worth
$118 billion. And while Gates hasn’t profited
directly from his Foundation, it’s clear
it promotes policies that protect his own
financial interests.
Of course, the obvious answer to all this
is: it’s his money, he can do what he wants.
And yes, this is true. But it’s worth noting
he doesn’t have to pay taxes on all those
charitable donations. You may say: this is
a good thing, if I want to donate $50 dollars
to my church which I won’t be taxed on,
isn’t that a free-er and more democratic
form of giving than whatever the government
decides to do with my taxes?
And, yes, there’s a certain allure to millions
of people freely choosing what causes their
money goes to before Uncle Sam gets his grubby
paws on it. But, with someone like Gates,
a single man has withheld billions of dollars
in government revenue and dispersed it according
to his own will. Sure, you might not like
where your tax dollars are going to, but at
least elected officials can be held accountable
when they allocate $20 million dollars to
research cyborg murder dolphins. Or maybe
we love that idea because that sounds super
cool, and re-elect everyone involved. Again,
democracy.
Now, you won’t hear stuff like this from
the conspiracy-sphere of the internet. If
you do, it might be a brief footnote in some
bigger, eviler plan. But that’s just the
problem. We don’t live in a crazy Orwellian
dystopia. We live in a very boring one. And
aside from eroding trust in science or causing
measles outbreaks, this is another big threat
from conspiracy theories: people waste their
powers of skepticism chasing phantoms instead
of scrutinizing the very flawed reality we
live in.
Even if you think Bill Gates is an angel,
that every public health policy he promotes
is a homerun, that his money is better spent
by him than Uncle Sam, you should at least
consider the idea as espoused by famed poet
Kanye West that “no one man should have
all that power.”
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