It largely started when he started trying to promote vaccinations in Africa.
Some American/Western religious and anti-vaxxers started spreading anti-vax conspiracies in those nations, indirectly leading to thousands if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. They played on the general lack of education in Africa.
The "chipping" part comes from this: Along with the injection there's a small amount of UV-reactive dye on the vaccine application device, that sits under the skin, and the application device leaves a different pattern of dye depending on which vaccines they got. The dye sits under the skin for a few years. So the idea is that if you're doing a vaccine program in a part of Africa where everyone is illiterate villagers, you can put the UV scanner on their arm and check for any dye blobs, so you can tell which vaccines were already given and how long ago they were. It's for situations where there is no sort of central record keeping, and is intended to do away with the need to create one, which is the opposite of what the conspiracy theorists will tell you. it's similar to some hysteria about a website using cookies to maintain user persistence between pages. People freak out "I'm being tracked by cookies". But the point is that cookies are decentralized: they only exist on your PC, and using them can actually do away with the need for any central database. If your site doesn't even have a database but it uses cookies, then it's not "tracking" you.
Bill Gates also said something about using digital certificates for record keeping, and this got conflated with the dye trials as "injecting people with digital certificates" which is already crazy, and that then evolved to "injecting people with microchips" and later the 5G stuff was tacked on, too.
I have reservations about the UV dye. If the group is organized enough to mount a mass-innoculation plan, they are organized enough to start digital charts on people, verify eligibility for the vaccination, and record what jabs were given. Anything that leaves an identifiable mark on a patient needs to be done with a great deal of care; Not just crazy christian conservatives have problems with concealed body modification, A good deal of other cultures do too. (Just the christian ones get absolutely hysterical, and cause such a big problem that in some cases, it outweighs the benefit of the innoculations.)
As for tracking cookies-- If cookies were used for their intended function, and ONLY their intended function, I would agree with you. The thing is, tracking people across multiple websites, and using cross-domain scripts to accomplish that, WAS NOT THE INTENT for either cookies, or javascript. Certainly not the production of perniciously persistent cookies, like the now infamous EverCookie. There is a
DESIRE to track people, for phat corporate profits through clear and present non-consentual and surreptitious online tracking, and corporate powers compelling developers to misuse their tools. Sure, session persistence in your browser so your shopping cart does not get lost, for instance, is just fine. But abusing Facebook/Google/AWS analytics to tag and then cross evaluate the user's browsing habits through cross site scripting and persistent cookies is not that thing. If the user clears their cookies, RESPECT THEY CLEARED THEIR COOKIES. If they choose not to keep persistent cookies (I do not, for instance-- I use a small compressed ramdisk to hold the browser cache, including the cookie store, mainly because browser makers have juvenile fantasies about how long data should last inside the browser cache, and also about how large it can be and how often it should be written to. I end-run that shit with my setup.) respect that too. At worst, the user has to keep signing in all the damn time, assuming you are using cookies correctly. Website breakage only happens when the developer is using cookies incorrectly.
Who decides when and where cookie use is incorrect? The end user. It's their computer getting the token put on it. That is why respecting the decision must be the norm, and not the other way around.