Matt Hancock cracks joke about Bill Gates Covid conspiracy

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 Microsoft billionaire Mr Gates’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 crackpot claims that the vaccination programme was being used as a means of controlling the world’s population by implanting microscopic microchips into people’s arms.

Some of them suggested the evil genius behind the plot was Mr Gates, who was once the world’s richest man.

On Jan 25, 2021 Damon Poole, Mr Hancock’s media adviser, sent him 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.

Many of the conspiracy theories about the Covid vaccine were said to have been spread on the internet by pro-Kremlin 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 fiction.

Another popular conspiracy theory said to have been spread by Russia was that the Oxford University/AstraZeneca jab was a “monkey vaccine” that not only contravened animal rights but would also turn people into monkeys.

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