Daily Times

Amidst the ongoing Coronavirus the debate –about its cure which involves quarantines, social distancing, antivirals and other drugs, and healthcare for the sick– has become heated. But apparently the novel idea of a vaccine for defeating Covid-19 – the quintessential silver bullet – has nonetheless become an issue of perturbing inoculation. A viral claim which is routed globally says Bill Gates is planning to use microchip implants to fight the coronavirus. Most of the posts being published now say Gates will launch human-implantable capsules that have digital certificates which can show who has been tested for the coronavirus and who has been vaccinated against it. On the other hand, some Americans like Roger Stone doubt that Bill Gates may have created coronavirus to microchip people.

According to a claim being relayed on Instagram and beyond, Bill Gates is pushing an effort during the current outbreak to track Americans using bracelets and invisible tattoos that would be delivered alongside a vaccine. The said theory also insinuates the project came along days after Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, stepped down from the company’s board of directors. It is also interesting to note while giving a comprehensive presentation almost five years ago in 2015 at the TED Bill Gates prognosticated the coming fear to be faced by a virus but not by an atom bomb. ”Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn’t look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it’s most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes”.

Any means of microchip installation into a human body raises the genuine issues of autonomy belonging to an individual’s free-thinking and independent locomotion

It is asserted: “Bill Gates and other globalists, in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies, are reportedly working to push tracking bracelets and ‘invisible tattoos’ to monitor Americans during an impending lockdown. MIT and Gates have ‘created an ink that can be safely embedded in the skin alongside the vaccine itself, and it’s only visible using a special smartphone camera app and filter.’ This comes days after Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board.” Awfully, over the past decade, Bill Gates has been intermittently warning about the lack of preparation and systems in place to deal with infectious disease threats that could lead to a pandemic. , some people on social media have been accusing Gates of starting the severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) pandemic. “I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic, in my lifetime, as well over 50 percent,” he told Ezra Klein in 2015.

“Something like the Spanish flu in the modern-day – health systems are far better, so you think, okay, that wouldn’t be very bad. What we showed [when infectious disease researchers working with the Gates Foundation modelled the scenario] was that the force of the infection, because of modern transport … within days, it’s basically in all urban centres of the entire globe.” The idea behind the research is that the dye would be visible under near-infrared light for up to five years and provide a quick, affordable way of helping health providers keep track of a child’s vaccinations, even when the paperwork gets lost or the parents forget whether their child is up to date. The dye wouldn’t monitor people’s habits or movements, as the Instagram post implies. It would essentially be a marker to see if someone received a vaccine upon inspection by a medical official.

In a blog post on April 30, Bill Gates wrote, “We need to manufacture at least 7 billion doses of the vaccine.” He said the vaccines should be distributed “as soon as the first batch is ready to go. Nikita Mikhalkov, the Oscar-winning Russian director, recently unraveled his own conspiracy after taking a closer look at the patent number for Microsoft’s crypto mining system – WO/2020/060606. Mikahlkov has claimed that the coming COVID-19 vaccination distributed by the Bill Gates Foundation will be a Trojan horse for a microchip in an insidious scheme to enslave the world.

Meanwhile, some are arguing that billionaire Bill Gates and his wife Melinda have committed $100 million of their own money to fight the coronavirus pandemic. In return, a fevered segment of the pro-Trump internet is convinced the couple wants to kill off a good portion of humanity, then install mark-of-the-beast style tracking chips in whoever survives. A coronavirus vaccine is still months or a year away, the prospective vaccine immunization programmes have to face resistance. In recent weeks, vaccine opponents have made several arguments accompanied by some logical apprehensions, including allegations that vaccine trials will be dangerously rushed. Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious diseases expert is against cures to enrich vaccine makers.

Arguably, immunization programmes are ethically defensible and consequently, the international community (via WHO’s platform) has an instrumental role to play in providing vaccination against infections/safeguarding the suffering humanity to optimize individuals’ immune capabilities. Because preventive actions interfere with individuals (who think themselves as healthy); public health strategies as distinct from advice in a clinical consultation crucially require something approaching certainty as to benefits and possible side effects of an intervention. The very principle of individual autonomy, a core value in bioethics, often tables debates– covering ethical issues in public health interventions.

Nonetheless, the anti-vaccine community, at large, believes that vaccines are a tool of government control that make big pharmaceutical companies rich and have side effects that can cause lasting damage. Yet there is a growing worry that in the smokescreen of COVID-19 cure, there occurs a suspicious linkage between vaccine and microchip providing a clue to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Biotechnology. Any means of microchip installation into a human body raises the genuine issues of autonomy belonging to an individual’s free-thinking and independent locomotion. It is highly suggestible the international community must be rethinking before it allows any such vaccine-covered up by the biotechnology. In this backdrop, it is also obligatory at the part of the Bill Gates Foundation to ward off the growing scepticism about his vaccine programme.

Notably, there are significant multilateral frameworks on biotechnology involving manifold international agreements relating to biotechnology are legally binding or strong political consensus, most importantly including, the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement, 1994), the International Plant Protection Convention (1997), the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Human Genome and Human Rights (1997), the Aarhus Convention (1998), the Biosafety Protocol (2000), the UNESCO International Declaration on Human Genetic Data (2003), and the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2005). Therefore, the Cov2 vaccine producing prospective governments are obliged to strictly follow the norms established under these rules.

The writer is an independent ‘IR’ researcher and international law analyst based in Pakistan