The Bill Gates conspiracy theorists (and why they’re wrong)
Mark Milke
After I posted a Forbes article the other day on Linked In that addressed the nonsensical conspiracy theory attacks on Bill Gates, the ones that claim he helped design and infect the world with the Coronavirus, the response from some posters was to…. get conspiratorial.
They might as well have written in CAPS. They argued that the only way Gates could have predicted a pandemic in detail was to HAVE SOME PRIOR KNOWLEDGE. In other words, according to the tin-hat crowd, Gates must have had some INVOLVEMENT (you can add multiple exclamation points here____)
“Good grief”, as Charlie Brown might say.
I won’t take my limited time to engage directly with conspiracy theorists. (I’d rather undergo water-boarding, or more positively, meet up with friends and break quarantine.) Attempts to do so are akin to trying to swat down every mosquito in the forest.
But for those interested in rational answers and useful reading, the reason Gates predicted a pandemic is not because he was Dr. Evil in a lab plotting to infect us all, but because he reads history and also understands statistical probabilities.
A useful book that helps us understand both comes from the University of Manitoba’s Vaclav Smil (Emeritus Professor of Environment). His 2008 book, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years, examines everything from energy transitions to volcanic eruptions to pandemics.
On the latter, in reviewing the frequency of epidemics and pandemics, Smil wrote an eerily prophetic gem of a prediction, though he properly disclaims any ability to offer bets on the future beyond showing us the relevant statistics: “The recurrence interval, calculated simply as the mean time elapsed between the last six known pandemics, is about 28 years, with the extremes of 6 and 53 years. Adding the mean and highest interval to 1968* gives a span between 1996 and 2021.” [*The reference here is to a 1968-1969 subtype H3N2 influenza which originated in Hong Kong and killed 1 million people worldwide.]
The world gets hit by (China-origin) Coronavirus in 2020, one year before the end year in Smil’s timespan. Pretty impressive narrowing of the range of probabilities.
And as Smil drily understated it at the end of that paragraph, “We are, probabilistically speaking, very much inside a high-risk zone.”
That was Smil in 2008. And he was (regrettably) correct.
There are other jewels of use and insight from Global Catastrophes. Here’s one highly relevant to today. Writing of the H5N1 virus and where it and others have originated since the late 1990s, Smil glances to East Asia, and specifically, China: “There is no way to eliminate the natural reservoirs of this virus. South China’s high densities and ubiquitous proximities of people, poultry, and pigs make the region a perennial source of new viruses, and studies show that domestic ducks in China’s southern provinces are the key reservoir of H5N1.”
Back to Bill Gates and the conspiracy theorists. The explanation for his knowledge is straightforward: He reads Smil and much else. A grasp on history and an understanding of statistical probabilities matter. That explains his past warnings.
If you encounter a conspiracy theorist, on this or any other topic, you’re unlikely to make headway with arguments. Instead, at least on pandemics, perhaps gift-wrap Global Catastrophes and send it their way.
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Mark Milke’s newest book is The Victim Cult: How the culture of blame hurts everyone and wrecks civilizations. Photo credit: Omni Matryx from Pixabay.