Bloomberg Businessweek - USA (2020-05-18)

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Bloomberg Businessweek

ThestoriesaboutBillGatesstarted

circulating in late January, around the

time health officials announced the first

confirmed case of Covid-19 in the U.S.

According to certain—ahem—sources,

the novel coronavirus hadn’t come

from bats, but from Gates, the billion-

aire philanthropist and Microsoft Corp.

co-founder. It wasn’t entirely clear why

he would engineer a global pandemic,

but versions of the conspiracy theory

pinned it on Gates’s supposed desire to

cull Earth’s population, or possibly to

surveil it.

Then again, if it wasn’t Bill Gates,

maybe it was the U.S. Army that had

unleashed the virus, in an effort to

undercut a rising China. Or it was cre-

ated by a Chinese military lab in Wuhan.

Or it was a consequence of 5G wireless

networks, a view that some people in the

U.K. took so seriously they went out and

destroyed actual 5G towers.

There were also strange ideas about

treatments. While doctors widely

believed the virus to be untreatable with

existing drugs, there were reports of a

game-changing therapy that involved

drinking industrial bleach—“Miracle

Mineral Solution,” proponents called it.