We came across a 11-second video being shared on a Singapore-based Telegram group:

Below is the video in full:

The video appears to be forwarded from a Telegram channel called “Nature of Truth”. Nothing much is known about the channel, but a quick check on the posts it has shared lean towards anti-vaccination narratives and theories that the media and governments are covering up some shady truth about the pandemic.

In the video, we see Melinda and Bill Gates speaking at what appears to be an event by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation (as seen in the video’s watermark). The context of what Bill Gates might be responding to is unclear, but we hear him saying: “So we- you know, we’ll have to prepare for the next one. That, you know, I’d say is…will get attention this time.”

The caption accompanying the video points out that both Melinda and Bill Gates appear to have a “smug smirk” on their faces.

A Telegram user who replied to the forwarded video then asked if the video was old, given that Bill and Melinda Gates have been officially divorced since August 2021.

The Telegram user who forwarded the video then clarified that the video is indeed old, and is thus evidence of “how insidious they have been talking about the next plandemic”.

The term ‘plandemic’ has been floating around since as early as mid-2020, following the release of a documentary of the same name.

Bill Gates has also been a ‘favourite’ among the anti-vaccination crowd, with claims of him allegedly knowing about the COVID-19 vaccine back in 2019 to allegedly saying that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines don’t work well emerging over the past two years.

When was the video taken?

When we did a Google search of the keywords “bill and melinda gates us chamber of commerce foundation”, we found that the clip was taken during an interview with the duo in June 2020. The full interview can be viewed here.

During the interview, the host mentioned that Bill Gates “got widespread attention for a prediction [he] made in 2015 about the dangers of the global pandemic”, and asked him about what he was currently concerned about.

To this, Bill Gates replied that “this won’t be the last pandemic that we face”, and that “pandemics can come from natural causes, which is largely coming across from other species”. He added that there’s therefore a need to “invest in making sure that we catch the disease sooner and that we have platforms to make diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines very quickly”.

He then makes a swipe at governments, saying that while there are “calls by a lot of people, including our Foundation […] very little was invested (in battling the pandemic)”.

He concludes: “People trust [the] government to think through these things. This was a failure to get ready, and the cost would have been tiny compared to what we spend on being ready for war. […] We’ll have to prepare for the next one. That will get attention this time.”

When taking into account the context of his reply, we can see that he is actually talking about the “attention” that his Foundation and like-minded individuals would get from governments when it comes to investing in and preparing for potential future pandemics.

As Reuters pointed out in their factcheck, the potential of another pandemic happening in the future has also been echoed by the World Health Organisation, global leaders, and medical experts.

Therefore, it is false that the video is evidence that there is a “plandemic” and that Bill Gates is part of it.