A popular conspiracy account resurfaced the misleading claim that Bill Gates sold his stock in COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers before admitting the vaccines are not effective. The claim is based on an out-of-context video clip.
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This myth has been circulated by vaccine opponents attempting to discredit COVID-19 vaccines since March. In the full video clip, Gates gave an honest assessment of the challenges facing COVID-19 vaccines in the current pandemic landscape. When COVID-19 vaccines were developed in 2020, they were designed to fight infection and severe illness from the original COVID-19 strain, which they did very effectively. In the more than three years since SARS-CoV-2 began circulating, it has undergone thousands of mutations that have altered the virus and enabled it to better evade both vaccine and infection immunity than earlier variants. The global scientific community works extremely hard to keep pace. Reiterating key messages is recommended: At every stage of the pandemic and against every variant, unvaccinated people have consistently been at a higher risk than vaccinated people for serious illness, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19. Fact Checking Source(s): Reuters, PolitiFact/Austin American-Statesman
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