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Well, that certainly didn’t take long. Once the current monkeypox outbreak spread to the U.S., it was only a matter of time before conspiracy theories about this outbreak began spreading as well. And it was only a matter of time before such conspiracy theories began mentioning Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist.
All of this should be about as surprising as a cat fight or a “here’s why you suck” speech on a reality TV show. After all, consider how many different Bill Gates-related conspiracy theories have emerged ever since the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic began in early 2020, some of which I covered for Forbes back in April 2020. For example, there was that Gates-placing-microchips-in-Covid-19-vaccines-to-track-everyone-for-who-knows-why conspiracy theory that people shared on Facebook and smartphones, two things that ironically do actually track people. Some politicians have further fueled such theories by either not denouncing them or even propagating them.