Vaccines: What did Bill Gates say?
In an April 3 interview with Trevor Noah of The Daily Show, Gates said his foundation would pay for the construction of factories to manufacture seven potential coronavirus vaccines. Two successful vaccines would be chosen for further trial.
Gates said: “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven just so we don’t waste time in serially saying ‘ok which vaccine works’ and then building the factory.”
On April 4, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa tweeted: The Gates Foundation has supported our health needs for many years. They have offered assistance with innovative mass-based testing kits and research.”
Neither the Trevor Noah interview nor Ramaphosa’s tweet mentioned any coronavirus tests focused on Africa. However, social media took both as confirmation that Gates intended to specifically target Africa for vaccine tests. This was false.
On April 4, South African website News24 published a story under the headline “Bill Gates confident a potential coronavirus vaccine will work in Africa, but Twitter does not think so”. The website later admitted the story was wrong.
“Nowhere in the interview does Gates mention testing a vaccine in Africa,” News24 admitted.
The site removed the story, issued an apology to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and instituted an investigation into how the false story got published.
Existing fears around vaccines, the controversy around the French doctors, plus the Bill Gates interview, all combined to feed into conspiracies that Africa would be targeted as a staging post for vaccine trials.
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