Bill Gates has been adamant since the beginning of the pandemic that the only way to end it is by vaccinating the global population. In an April 2020 blog post, he stated, “We need to manufacture and distribute at least 7 billion doses of the vaccine” … “or possibly 14 billion, if it’s a multidose vaccine.” He also said, “I suspect the COVID-19 vaccine will become part of the routine newborn immunization schedule.”¹

Coincidentally, Gates also personally supported and participated in Event 201,² which simulated a worldwide pandemic triggered by a novel coronavirus.³ The primary response to the simulated pandemic, which turned into reality just months later? Developing and distributing patentable antiviral medications and a new wave of vaccines.

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are here, however, Gates isn’t too keen on the idea of lifting the patent protection on them, which would open the doors for generic versions to be manufactured, increasing supplies and lowering costs — and ultimately getting more vaccines to middle- and low-income nations.

That was Gates’ stated goal, after all, so it’s ironic, then, that Gates told Britain’s Sky News that lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines would not be useful⁴ — a statement that Krystal Ball, host of The Hill’s “Rising With Krystal and Saagar” morning show calls an outright lie driven by one word — greed.⁵

Bill Gates Lied About Vaccine Patents

About 75% of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in high-income countries, according to Ball, while more than 100 countries haven’t administered even one dose.⁶

While there are many reasons to think carefully before getting the vaccine — the criminal past of vaccine manufacturers, no long-term safety testing or informed consent, and under-reporting of adverse reactions and death, for starters — going from Gates’ goal of vaccinating the world, the lack of vaccine availability in most of it is glaring.

The U.S. just lifted an embargo on raw materials needed to help make COVID-19 vaccines in India at the end of April 2021,⁷ which would increase vaccination rates. Then there were Gates’ own comments about whether he thought lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines would be helpful, to which he responded no:⁸

“The thing that’s holding things back, in this case, is not intellectual property. It’s not like there’s some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You’ve got to do the trial on these things. And every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.

There’s only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. Moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India, it’s novel, it’s only because of our grants and expertise that can happen at all.”

An Associated Press (AP) investigation, however, found three factories on three continents that have the capacity to produce hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines “if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how.”⁹ One such factory in Bangladesh, with “gleaming new equipment imported from Germany” and “immaculate hallways lined with hermetically sealed rooms,” is operating at only 25% capacity.¹⁰

In Canada, pharmaceutical company Biolyse has a similar story and is actively trying to get the recipe to make COVID-19 vaccines from AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson so they can start production and provide millions of doses to the global south. They even asked the Canadian government to give them emergency authorization to produce the patented products, with no success. Speaking to The Guardian, vice president John Fulton said:¹¹

“We’ve been passed over. We’ve got this production capacity and it’s not being put to use. If we had started this last year, we could have shipped millions of doses by now. This is supposed to be like a wartime effort, everyone in it together. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.” . . .