evidence: When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an alert about finding four malaria cases in Florida and one malaria case in Texas, it created quite a buzz. After all, these were the first reported cases of people actually catching malaria in the U.S. since 2003. Finding these five cases has raised questions about whether malaria may return to the U.S. after being largely absent for many years and whether climate change may be opening the gates for Anopheles mosquitoes to spread in the U.S. That would kind of suck since the females of certain Anopheles mosquito species can carry and transmit malaria-causing parasites. This news also opened the gates in another way—allowing a flood of even more conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates to be spread across social media. This included claims that Gates was somehow responsible for these new malaria cases via a project that has released genetically-modified mosquitoes in the U.S. However, such claims really provided zzzzzero supporting evidence and, in fact, detracted from what’s really happened. For example, Liz Churchill, who even calls herself a "conspiracy theorist" on her Twitter bio, sent out a tweet that hit the fan and spread with over 23.5K re-tweets. Her tweet said, "It must be a coincidence that from 2003-2023 there wasn’t one case of Malaria spread by mosquitos…and along comes a company funded by Bill Gates…to solve a problem that didn’t exist…and suddenly in the exact places where he releases mosquitos…there’s an outbreak of Malaria?"