FORMER world No1 Marat Safin has bizarrely claimed the coronavirus pandemic is a conspiracy for people to “have chips inserted” into their bodies.
Russian tennis ace Safin, 40, made the comments during an interview with Russian sports portal Sports.ru.
Safin said: “I think that people are being prepared to have chips inserted. Bill Gates said back in 2015 that we are all going to have an epidemic, then a pandemic. That our next enemy is a virus, not a nuclear war.”
American businessman Gates, 64, spoke at a TED talk entitled ‘The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready’ in 2015 where he called a virus today’s “greatest risk of global catastrophe”.
Safin added: “Then they held a simulation at the Davos forum just two weeks prior to the virus becoming known in the world.
“They showed how things will go. I don’t think that Bill Gates is a predictor he just knew and they were all preparing for it.”
A simulation called ‘Event 201’ was held on October 18, 2019 in New York City just before Covid-19 became public knowledge.
The name ‘Event 201’ was used because around 200 epidemics affect the world every year and experts suggested there was a growing likelihood of one of those events becoming a global threat, according to the World Economic Forum.
The simulation included the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Safin added that we are being manipulated by the “horror stories on television”.
In views echoing British boxer Amir Khan, he continued: “Why would they also launch the 5G network? Then the nanochips will be introduced. Look what is happening around us. People are in a panic.
“I think that everything is not as it is told, it is all a prepared situation.
“But the people believe in everything, in horror stories on TV, everyone now knows, understands, advises each other how many masks to buy, what to do.
“Therefore, opinions are divided. Someone believes that morgues are everywhere, people are dying in bundles, civilisation will end soon, but I don’t believe it. We’ll just be going around with the chip soon.”
The former US Open champion added he was not saying “anything new” as “everything is on the internet”.
It is unclear how exactly Safin thinks the “chips” will be implanted but local media suggest they will be injected through a vaccine.
When asked who he thought was behind the conspiracy, he said: “I think there are men more powerful than all those leaders [presidents and prime ministers]. People that really handle the money, owners of the world. We don’t even know they exist.”
Latest figures show there have been 47,121 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Russia with 405 deaths meanwhile worldwide there have been 2.4million positive tests and more than 165,000 fatalities.
As a tennis player, Safin was ranked as world No1 for nine weeks in 2000, winning the US Open that year.
After defeats in the 2002 and 2004 finals, he added the Australian Open in 2005, beating Roger Federer en route to the final against Lleyton Hewitt.
He helped Russia win the Davis Cup in 2002 and 2006. He became the first Russian man to reach the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 2008 and be inducted in the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
After his retirement in November 2009, he became a deputy of the State of Duma and joined the Russian Parliament representing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in 2011.
