Almost half of Republicans believe Bill Gates is ‘plotting to use coronavirus vaccines to implant microchips in people’

NEARLY half of Republican voters and a nearly fifth of Democrats believe that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates will use COVID-19 vaccinations to implant microchips in billions of people.

Published Monday, the research by Yahoo News/YouGov revealed that 44 percent of GOP voters and 19 percent of Democrats believe the conspiracy is true.

Altogether, 28 percent of American adults surveyed said they believe the story.

Only 26 percent of GOP voters thought it was untrue that Gates intended to implant vaccine-delivered microchips.

The whacky conspiracy theory has been thoroughly , with Gates never proposing such a program – and the technology to do so is still entirely theoretical.

The chip rumor appears to have come about after a funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published last year explored the possibility that vaccine-delivery technology could be designed to implant a tracer inside patients that could then be registered by a smartphone.

Though the technology does not yet exist, Gates’ coupled with many Americans’ and a fear of living in a surveillance state has fueled the online paranoia.

As the American death toll for COVID-19 reaches 100,000, many are looking to the arrival of a vaccine as the breakthrough that could allow public life to begin returning to normal.

Anti-vaxxers, however, have used the opportunity to spread on forums such as Reddit, building on years of false rumors that Gates wants to use vaccines to microchip as many people as possible to track their movements.

Gates has suggested the possibility of a database of those who have become immune to the virus, but never the implantation of microchips.

The rumor has been pushed by legions of anti-vaxxers, who have long attacked Gates’ advocacy and who have due to the .

Some have even suggested that Gates engineered the virus for personal profit.

The same Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that 56 percent of Americans surveyed are “very” concerned about “false or misleading information being communicated about coronavirus.”