Bill Gates is now breeding 30 million mosquitos per week in a factory in Colombia and he is threatening to “scale and deliver” the mosquitos, which are infected with an infertility bacteria, to “communities around the world.”
While mosquitoes are most often thought of as a nuisance, they are actually among the world’s deadliest animals, contributing to about one million human deaths per year because they carry and transmit a variety of deadly pathogens. Perhaps this is why Gates is almost as obsessed with mosquitos as he is with vaccines. Remember when he released mosquitos into an auditorium, prompting nervous laughter? This is the behavior of a Bond villain.
Gates also funds Mosquito City in Tanzania, Africa, a research zone which Gates boasts is “always buzzing.”
But a whole city dedicated to studying mosquitos isn’t enough for Gates. The Microsoft founder and self-appointed World Health Czar has also spent $185 million so far in setting up a “mosquito factory” in Colombia as part of his World Mosquito Program (WMP).
The stated goal of Gates’ project? To use the mosquitos — which are infected with a bacteria that causes infertility — to target native mosquito populations that supposedly cause dengue, zika, and other viral infections in humans.
Gates—who’s been lambasted by Indian Parliament for unethical “cervical cancer vaccine” trials, posted in a video to his YouTube channel. In the video description Gates gives the broad strokes of how the WMP operation in Medellín breeds mosquitos purposefully infected with the bacteria Wolbachia and then releases them “across the country to breed with wild mosquitos that can carry dengue and other viruses threatening to sicken and kill the population.”
On its face, the project’s goal is to have the lab-bred mosquitoes deliver the Wolbachia to native mosquito populations, causing said populations to become infected with the bacteria. The Wolbachia bacteria, which is found in 50% of all the insect species on Earth (including fruit flies, dragonflies, moths, butterflies, etc.), affects the ability for mosquitoes—in this case, the species Aedes aegypti, which originates in Africa—to reproduce.
According to Gates’ World Mosquito Program, if a male mosquito with Wolbachia mates with a female, her eggs won’t hatch; if a male without the bacteria mates with a female who has it, then her offspring will hatch and they’ll all have it; and if both the male and female have Wolbachia, then all of the offspring will also hatch and have Wolbachia.
But there are some serious problems with Gates’ plans. It appears he is playing God and refusing to bother with clinical trials again.
In his post explaining WMP’s efforts on Gates Notes, Gates highlights a pair of studies supposedly showing the strategy working to prevent diseases. He references one randomized controlled trial (RCT) from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which claims to have found a reduction in the number of dengue cases in the city by 77% and dengue hospitalizations by 86%. Gates also touts a newer study from Medellín claiming to show a decline of 89% in dengue cases since Wolbachia mosquitoes started being released in 2015.
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