Bill Gates says world should be ‘back to normal’ by end-2022, thanks to vaccines

Microsoft founder Bill Gates predicted this week the world would be “back to normal” by the end of 2022 thanks to the coronavirus vaccines.

Gates’ philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has donated US$1.75 billion to support vaccines and possible treatments to combat the worldwide pandemic.

In December, Gates made a similar prediction regarding when life may get back to normal, telling CNN, “Certainly, by the summer we’ll be way closer to normal than we are now, but even through early 2022, unless we help other countries get rid of this disease and we get high vaccinations rates, the risk of reintroduction will be there.

“We can see now that somewhere between 12 to 18 months, we have a chance, if we manage it well, to get back to normal.”

Since the pandemic began a year ago, millions of conspiracies have spread over social media, fuelling misinformation about the pandemic, its origins and the motives of those working to fight it.

Bill Gates has been at the centre of wild Covid-19 and vaccine conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists claim that Gates and Dr Anthony Fauci, the top adviser to the US president, created the pandemic to try and control people and they want to profit from the spread of the virus.

Other theories claim that Fauci and Gates want to use vaccines to insert trackable microchips into people.

Another claims Gates is seeking to kill 15% of the world’s population with the vaccines.

Gates has called the claims “crazy” and “evil” and asked if people “really believe that stuff”.

During a 2015 TED Talk, Gates issued a dire warning that, “if anything kills over 10 million people over the next decade, it is likely to be a highly infectious virus, rather than a war”.

Conspiracy theorists claim his statement is proof that he had prior knowledge of the coronavirus.