Bill Gates Says Patents are More Important Than More COVID Vaccines

I just found out today that there’s a conspiracy theory that believes Bill Gates created the COVID-19 coronavirus variant in order to reduce the world population and make money on the vaccine, I guess. It’s like the plot of a bad movie with a poorly-motivated villain.

I do agree that Bill Gates is evil and his portrayal of himself as some great humanitarian is mostly bullshit. Since he announced he was devoting his life to charity and giving away most of his money, he’s actually gotten way richer than he was.

While Bill Gates didn’t create COVID, he sure as hell doesn’t think stopping it is more important than protecting patents.

Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it’s novel — it’s only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all.

Basically what Gates is saying is “if you want to stop the pandemic, the answer isn’t to tell people how to make vaccines that work, it’s to make checks payable to Bill Gates.”

Now, the idea that Bill Gates is trying to kill a bunch of people to solve overpopulation is ridiculous and he would be doing a really bad job. Don’t get me wrong, COVID is something we should take seriously and get vaccinated for and wear masks and generally act like it’s the pandemic it is. Three million global dead is a lot of people, but it’s a drop in the ocean of the global population of nearly 8 billion people, about 3/4s of whom would have to die to “solve” overpopulation if you were to do it by killing people, which would be insane.

But you don’t have to have created a situation to see a big opportunity to cash in.