Bill Gates Won't Track Citizens With Microchips

Bill Gates, no doubt the world’s biggest investor in health, went on Reddit.com on March 18 and participated in an “AMA” or “ask me anything” with regard to the topical COVID crisis. In that thread, he wrote:

“Eventually, we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it."

This response has fueled a conspiracy theory that claims Bill Gates has plans to use the COVID crisis to implant microchips that “track people.” The concept of microchip tracking first circulated among decentralized conspiracy theorists online, but has recently gone mainstream.

On April 6, Emerald Robinson, White House correspondent for the website Newsmax tweeted about Gates, concluding, “He basically controls global health policy. What’s the plan? Using vaccines to track people.” Fox news has also picked up the story.

Gates has responded to his accusations but has not touched on the specific issue of government control of citizens’ private information in doing so.

South Korea, which has implemented a testing system that is extensive compared to that of the US but nowhere near as extensive as Gates’ proposed system, created a government website that showed information about the locations of patients who tested positive for COVID-19 in order to put others in those areas on alert. Even though the personal information on the site is anonymous, the site has still drawn criticism from invasion of privacy— let alone a personalized database tracking health records.

Furthermore, research has been funded by the Gates Foundation, published just this past December, that designs a record-keeping invisible dye that could last up to five years in order to record the vaccination status of a citizen on their body and be read by authorities equipped with a smartphone. However, the timely relationship between this research and the COVID outbreak remains purely speculative.

Indeed, it would seem that Gates is advocating using vaccine health records to “track” people, perhaps not necessarily in their movements but in their health records, in a centralized government database. But what are these “Digital Certificates” that seem to have been equated with microchip implants? In short, digital certificates are software used to send encrypted information over the internet.

            In summary, it would seem that Gates has advocated for the use of a potentially extremely invasive system of digital government tracking citizen health status, and has invested in technology that will stay on the human skin for five years in order for authorities to identify citizen health status with smartphones, but has not specifically advocated for microchip implants as of yet.