Gims is spreading false information again

Gims mentioned conspiracy theories around Bill Gates and vaccination in an interview. The rapper is used to fake news.

This is an interview that has been watched more than two million times, at the time of writing this column. The rapper Gims, sitting in the front of Loris Giuliano’s car, answers his questions during a short ride. At the seventh minute, he returns with emphasis and many exaggerations to his meeting with Bill Gates in December 2023. The rapper assures that the founder of Microsoft wanted to make him the face of a polio vaccination campaign in his country, Congo.

“I understand that he wants to use me to vaccinate a bunch of people in Congo”he explains. “I saw the darkness”adds the rapper, referring to “leases” from Bill Gates: “I knew he was in a pot mode and everything, but the truth is I saw other articles that came out, he had this experience there, I don’t know if it’s true or if it’s false.” Gims says that he was offered a large sum of money but that he refused so as not to threaten the health of an entire country. Conclusion: “There is no one vaccinated in Congo.”

Gims says a lot of things in this interview, some of which are unverifiable, but it is important to first emphasize that what he says about the state of vaccination in Congo is false. Several vaccination campaigns have taken place in the country, even without the rapper’s help, including a large-scale one last summer at the initiative of the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The ambition was to vaccinate more than 23 million children orally, particularly in remote and hard-to-reach areas. The campaign was carried out in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and with the financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is particularly involved in the fight to eradicate this virus in Africa.

Vaccination is the only way to combat this paralyzing disease, which mainly attacks the lower limbs but can also paralyze the respiratory muscles and cause death.

What is most striking in this interview is that the rapper spreads several conspiracy theories, without necessarily taking them on board but still giving them light and without ever saying that they are false. At best, he says that he does not know if they are true or false.

He mentions, for example, “experiences” that Bill Gates allegedly made in Africa, which takes up a well-known theme of conspiracy theories around vaccination and the founder of Microsoft, propagated across the world in anti-vax speeches during the Covid-19 pandemic. The philanthropist was notably accused of wanting to implant 5G chips in us via vaccines.

These false accusations have a particular resonance in African countries where, it is true, Westerners have carried out experiments in the past. The World Africa already noted, in May 2020, how anti-Bill Gates conspiracy theories resonated powerfully in Africa, particularly because of the memory of medical scandals. Conspiracy theories that Bill Gates himself found “laughable” in an exclusive interview with The Express in September 2021.

Gims also said that he knew that Bill Gates “was in saucepan mode”, by mentioning without further details his theoretical involvement in the Epstein case, named after Jeffrey Epstein, an American billionaire accused of raping teenage girls and running an international prostitution ring for minors. In one of the legal proceedings related to this case, a list of names of the billionaire’s close associates was revealed. Several rumors said that Bill Gates was on it, wrongly: he was never worried in this case. Furthermore, the people mentioned in the list are not necessarily accomplices of Jeffrey Epstein, some are only acquaintances.

This case has fueled the conspiracy theory that a Western elite, particularly American, is involved in a vast network of child sex trafficking.

This is not the first time that Gims has flirted with conspiracy theories. In April 2023, he had already provoked the anger of many Egyptologists. The rapper had assured in another interview that the pyramids of Egypt were “electric antennas”. A false information known as the “ancient astronauts” theory. This is the idea that the Egyptians received help from extraterrestrials who came to Earth to bring knowledge unknown to man, which allowed them to build the pyramids.

“This is all crazy from A to Z, none of it is true!”the chief curator of the Egyptian antiquities department of the Louvre Museum, Christophe Barbotin, reacted strongly to the Vrai ou Faux junior of franceinfo.

All this might be laughable if the rapper did not have such a huge audience. Every time he spreads false information, millions of people hear it, without ever any contradiction.