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| - Bill Gates, vaccines and population control make for infectious conspiracy theory
Social media users are sharing an old newspaper article that highlights Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's plan to depopulate the world through forced vaccination.
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India Today Fact Check
This 2011 article by Ireland-based newspaper “The Sovereign Independent” incorrectly suggests that Gates wants to depopulate the world through vaccinations. Gates had stated that vaccinations can reduce child mortality, which in turn leads to reduced birth rates and population growth.
Amid reports of several deaths in Norway after administration of Covid-19 vaccine, a viral Facebook message claims that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wants to reduce the world population through forced vaccination. The Facebook post shows an old newspaper article to substantiate the claim.
Several Facebook users have posted an image of a 2011 edition of Ireland-based newspaper “The Sovereign Independent”, whose front page headline says, “Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination: The Zero Carbon Solution”.
The front page also has a picture of Bill Gates with a quote supposedly given by him. The social media caption along with the image says, “WE HAVE THE WHOLE THING! THE NOTORIOUS 2011 ARTICLE ON BILL GATES AND DEPOPULATION”.
India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) has found that this 2011 article by “The Sovereign Independent” incorrectly suggests that Gates wants to depopulate the world through vaccinations. Gates had stated that vaccinations can reduce child mortality, which in turn leads to reduced birth rates and population growth.
The archived versions of the post are saved here, here and here.
The newspaper and its conspiracy articles
With the help of keyword search, we found that the viral cover image is of the fourth edition of “The Sovereign Independent” that was published in 2011. The archived link of this edition is saved here.
“The Sovereign Independent” is an Ireland-based newspaper available only in hard copies. According to a note by its editor Dave Derby, the first edition was published in 2009. Though the newspaper is not available online now, archived versions of its old editions can be accessed easily.
We found that the newspaper had published several such articles on conspiracy theories in 2011, ranging from calling Osama Bin Laden “a contrived hoax” to autism caused by vaccination.
What Gates said about population and vaccination
Calling the Microsoft founder “Billy ‘The Kid Killer’ Gates”, the article used an old quote of him on population in a wrong context.
The quote reads, “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent.”
The article states that it is the agenda of Bill Gates and the United Nations to depopulate the world through vaccines.
In a TED talk in 2010 titled “Innovating to Zero”, Gates can be heard saying this sentence at 4 minutes and 21 seconds into the video. Gates was discussing ways the world could reduce carbon emissions and suggested that one way was by reducing population growth through improving healthcare.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged billions of dollars in vaccination programmes across the world.
We found that on several occasions, Gates has said that by improving healthcare, population growth can actually be slowed down. In an interview in 2012 and also in a YouTube video in 2018, he repeated the same point.
In an article in “Forbes” magazine published in 2011, Gates found from statistics that in countries where child mortality rate has reduced, birth rates are also found to be depleting. So he thinks that by improving healthcare and by vaccination, the world population can be stabilised.
We found that similar quotes by Gates regarding population control and vaccinations have been used in the wrong context several times, many of which have been debunked by fact-checkers.
Hence, the claim that Bill Gates plans to depopulate the world through forced vaccination is false.
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