Matt Hancock ‘joked about Bill Gates Covid vaccine conspiracy theory

Matt Hancock joked that Bill Gates ‘owes me one’ because of ‘how many people I’m getting his chips injected into’ during the pandemic, leaked WhatsApp messages have revealed. 

The then Health Secretary referred to unfounded claims that Gates had developed Covid-19 in a lab and used the vaccine to implant microchip tracking devices into billions of people.

Hancock at the time was hoping to get the Microsoft billionaire to help in promoting the country’s expertise in identifying coronavirus variants around the world.

On January 25 2021 Hancock’s media adviser Damon Poole asked him via WhatsApp if he had spoken to the director general of the World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus about the New Variant Assessment Platform (NVAP) – a service offering the UK’s expertise in detecting new variants of the virus.

Conspiracy theorists claimed that Bill Gates (pictured) had developed Covid-19 in a lab and used the vaccine to implant microchip tracking devices into people

Matt Hancock (pictured) joked that Bill Gates ‘owes me one’ because of ‘how many people I’m getting his chips injected into’

Mr Poole then said: ‘No promises but I’m trying to land a Bill gates endorsement of the platform.’

In a response, Hancock said: ‘Tell him that considering how many people I’m getting his chips injected into, he owes me one!’

The revelation is one of many published by The Telegraph after the paper was handed more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages from Mr Hancock’s phone by the journalist to whom he entrusted them in order to ghostwrite his book, Pandemic Diaries.

Journalist Isabel Oakeshott claimed ‘he didn’t tell me he was going’ to Australia for I’m a Celebrity and he ‘vanished to the jungle at a critical moment in very difficult dealings with the Cabinet Office’. 

She subsequently handed The Daily Telegraph 100,000 of Mr Hancock’s WhatsApp texts, which she has described as a ‘cache of very raw communications’.

The MP has since said her actions were a ‘massive betrayal’ used to produce ‘a partial, biased account to suit an anti-lockdown agenda’. 

Other messages have revealed that Hancock was given advice from England’s chief medical officer Chris Whitty to test all residents going into care homes for Covid. Yet he did not follow the recommendation — which, he claims, was due to test shortages at the time.

Texts set out that Cabinet Secretary Simon Case joked with Mr Hancock about locking up travellers arriving in UK in quarantine hotels.

And Mr Hancock told ministers to ‘get heavy with police’ to enforce lockdown rules, according to the messages. 

The most recent revelation revealed that Hancock took his lover Gina Coladangelo to private dinners with the US Secretary of State at a G7 summit before later removing the suggestion he invited her.

The Health Secretary, who was later forced to resign after his affair with Ms Coladangelo emerged, brought his lover, who he had been seeing for a month, to two private dinners with his US counterpart as his guest.

Representatives for Matt Hancock have been contacted by MailOnline for comment.