During a conversation on COVID, Bill Gates reminisced about the pandemic, saying he doesn’t remember promoting masks before joking about how crazy some people got when it came to wearing them.

“I don’t remember talking about masks at all,” Gates said.

“But the two of you,” he continued, motioning to others at the table, “you personally [used] masks—I remember you seemed like a really extreme case. You would wear the full thing to leave your apartment.”

“It’s like, is he going overboard? Is he germophobic,” Gates laughed.

Masks didn’t work and mandates were a terrible policy

As many will remember (practically everyone but Gates himself, apparently), Bill Gates was one of the biggest and earliest advocates of masks during the COVID era, despite there being no evidence that masks provide any protection against respiratory viruses and actually may have exacerbated the virus and made things worse.

Infamously and as late as February 2022, Gates equated wearing a mask outdoors to putting on a pair of pants, saying it’s just something you have to do to be a part of society.

“What’s the downside of wearing a mask? You have to wear pants… These societies are so cruel—why do they make you wear pants? I’m trying to figure it out,” he said sarcastically.

Gates also was an advocate of forever-masking, i.e., masks becoming part of people’s everyday lives even after COVID stopped being an issue.

“In the future, some mask-wearing probably will be indicated,” Gates said. “We’ll have [COVID] rebounds, but they’ll be more like typical seasonal flu levels, where, of course, we don’t generally shut things down.”

From breathing in excess carbon dioxide and microplastics to childhood developmental disorders from not seeing people’s faces during early development, masks and mask mandates were a horrible recommendation and requirement around the world, and there was likely no higher-profile mask pusher than Bill Gates, who has conveniently forgotten all of it.