Bill Gates says there will be no public/mass gatherings in the light of COVID19 pandemic until everyone is vaccinated – Facebook post
A comment by Bill Gates during an interview was misrepresented. Mr Gates, in response to a question, said the U.S. government needs to prioritise and decide which activities to allow should it decide to open up the country after weeks of lockdown. Mass gatherings, he said, is not an option now and might not come back until people are widely vaccinated.
Full Text
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, Bill Gates, has been in the news over various issues since the coronavirus pandemic began.
One of the most recent claims circulating on social media is that Mr Gates stated that there will be no public gatherings until every human in the world has been vaccinated. This post has circulated on many platforms including Facebook, generating a wide range of highly disparaging comments against Mr Gates’ personality. Comments on this post include calls for God’s judgement on Mr Gates. See another similar post here.
These comments are not far off from those related to a long line of posts linking Mr Gates to 5G, coronavirus and the biblical mark of the beast (666).
The post quoting Mr Gates as saying public gatherings will not return until everyone receives the coronavirus vaccine is, however, misleading.
Verification
Mr Gates has made many appearances in the media in recent times. In relation to this particular claim, Dubawa found that portions of Mr Gates’ interview on CBS This Morning, with host Anthony Mason in which he called for nationwide social isolation policy to slow the spread of coronavirus, have been misrepresented.
The interview was based largely on Mr Gates’ views on the spread of the coronavirus pandemic and measures already in place to mitigate further spread. During the interview, he called for a nationwide social isolation policy to slow the spread of the pandemic and for the federal government to prioritise testing.
The conversation leading to the generation of these posts stemmed from Mr Gates’ concern about the U.S. government’s response to the pandemic. According to Mr Gates, an issue that his foundation’s experts and the United States government are in discussions about is what opening up will look like even if the government and the agencies at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19 are able to get coronavirus cases numbers down.
He suggested that there could be reinfection globally if some activities like mass gatherings are restored unconditionally, that is without regard to the significance of mass vaccination.
The transcript of the show was posted on April 2, 2020. It revealed some parts of the conversation between Mr Gates and Mr Mason. Watch the extended interview here.
After a careful review of the transcript, we were able to identify the portion of the conversation from which the claim being fact-checked was selected by the author of the claim under scrutiny here. Below is an excerpt of that interview :
Mason: …is there anything that’s really surprised you about what’s happened?
Gates: You know, I thought we would respond a bit faster. …what we’re doing, how we’re having to change the economy here in order to drop the number of cases, it’s, you know, it’s really unprecedented… Even the issue of once you get the cases numbers down… but what does opening up look like? You know, which activities have, like schools, have such benefit and can be done in a way that the risk of transmission is very low?
Mason: Yeah.
Gates: And which activities, like mass gatherings, may be— in a certain sense— more optional. And so until you’re widely vaccinated, those may not come back at all.
Mynorthwest.com published an article on the interview where the author, Nick Bowman, correctly stated what Mr Gates said in the interview by titling it, “Bill Gates- Mass gatherings might not return until we get coronavirus vaccine.”
Conclusion
Mr Gates has made his views on the ongoing pandemic known on many occasions. In this particular instance, what he said has been misrepresented. Mr Gates said that there may be the need to ensure wide vaccination of people before mass gatherings can be allowed, to avoid reinfection.
