SINGAPORE — Singaporeans reporting a sudden increase in mosquitoes have been urged to remain calm, stop drawing irresponsible conclusions, and consider the possibility that their reflexes have simply deteriorated dramatically over the past year.
In a Reddit thread about mosquitoes in Bukit Batok, residents described sleepless nights, persistent bites, and insects apparently capable of completing advanced evasive manoeuvres in an HDB bedroom.
I sprayed Baygon directly at a few mosquitoes but they don’t die!! They just continue flying off unless I spray them down like crazy.
In another thread, a resident complained that the mosquitoes appeared to have “multiplied quadruple,” before issuing the measured policy recommendation:
Its 3am and I just want to sleep la… NEA… Can we not do this again? Please?”
These are, of course, personal observations rather than controlled experiments. A mosquito surviving insecticide does not establish pesticide resistance, just as repeatedly missing one does not establish that it has attended flight school.
It certainly has nothing to do with genius billionaire playboy philanthropist Bill Gates.
The Gates Foundation announced its Singapore office in May 2025, after the Trump administration began cutting thousands of USAID programmes. The foundation says the office opened in 2026. This is a chronology, which readers are reminded is the least responsible kind of evidence when arranged ominously in a paragraph.
Yes, the organisation formerly known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported gene-drive research intended to suppress malaria-carrying mosquitoes, as well as the World Mosquito Program’s Wolbachia work. Neither fact makes the mosquito in your bedroom a regional employee.
More importantly, Gates is a philanthropist with a good heart, as independently confirmed by Bill Gates.
“That’s why I’m giving away virtually all of my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years,” he wrote on his own X account. The statement provides compelling evidence of his intentions, having come directly from the person whose intentions were being assessed.
Readers should also dismiss the unsupported rumour that Microsoft created computer viruses to sell antivirus software in the 90s, a theory belonging firmly in the alt-right neckbeard section of the internet, between a seventeen-hour livestream and an argument about women in video games.
Computer viruses and mosquitoes are entirely different things. One enters your home without permission and ruins your evening. The other has wings.
At press time, a resident had successfully killed a mosquito and was waiting for confirmation that doing so would not invalidate its warranty.
