As the fake news about Microsoft founder and philanthropist re-surfaced about him investing $20 billion in the Philippines, another fake news about Gates also came to light. This time, Filipino netizens are sending a warning to the Philippine government to be careful about accepting donation from Gates due to “unconfirmed reports” that Gates’ company is distributing dangerous vaccines.
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“PLS TAKE NECESSARY PRECAUTION: To the Ph Gov authorities : Re: Donation from Mr. Bill Gates.: There are unconfirmed reports that Mr Gates company is engaged in manufacture and distribution of vaccines , (Ebola vaccine in Africa), AND that safety assurance verification/test for the above is still not conclusive. Perhaps its wise for the govt to conduct a thorough profiling of Mr Gates organization before ACCEPTING ANY DONATION/S,” one Facebook user said.
Another one even provided a link to an article claiming that Gates said “vaccines are the best way to depopulate.”
The website awarenessact.com did write an article about Gates allegedly openly admitting that vaccinations can effectively help governments depopulate the world.
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The site claimed the following:
“Gates has stated that in order to depopulate a so-called overcrowded world successfully at least 350,000 people must be killed with each day that passes. This he says can be done through vaccine programs! How disgusting is that, using vaccines to kill people rather than prevent disease and promote health? This does not surprise me at all, Gates seems to think that we must all agree to a strategy in which will involve killing other humans in order to ‘control the population.”
We searched for more articles related to this claim about Gates and his alleged preference to use vaccines to “kill” people and reduce the world’s population and found this articles from fact-checking website Snopes.com about how the stories about Gates admitting to using vaccinations to depopulate the world was misconstrued because Gates’ intention was definitely not to kill people.
According to Snopes, the story came from the conspiracy theory site YourNewsWire.com with a headline “Bill Gates Admits ‘Vaccines Are Best Way To Depopulate.’”
The story on YourNewsWire.com is similar to that of awarenessact.com in that both stories are claiming that Gates proposed to have at least 350,000 people killed daily through vaccine programs. It also claimed that Gates tried to convince people to consent to killing human to save Earth from the carbon dioxide we emit. The story went on to discuss the dangers of vaccines due to the chemicals, particularly aluminum, added to make them more effective.
According to Snopes, YourNewsWire.com even included a YouTube clip showing Gates’ interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. Since we can no longer access the video from the archived version of the story, we thought Snopes was referring to the same video used by awarenessact.com in its article.
In conclusion, Snopes debunked the story, clarifying Gates’ and his wife Melinda’s stand when it comes to using vaccines and their effect on the world’s population.
Snopes quoted a part of the 2009 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Annual Letter:
“A surprising but critical fact we learned was that reducing the number of deaths actually reduces population growth. […] Contrary to the Malthusian view that population will grow to the limit of however many kids can be fed, in fact parents choose to have enough kids to give them a high chance that several will survive to support them as they grow old. As the number of kids who survive to adulthood goes up, parents can achieve this goal without having as many children.”
This showed how Gates is not after using vaccines to kill people or sterilize them without their knowledge. What Gates wants is to keep more kids alive to reduce the parents’ need to have more kids, therefore reducing population growth rate.
Reducing population growth has long been the mission of the Gates’ foundation, as per the 2011 Forbes cover story about the foundation. The couple thought that limiting population growth is important to “improving people’s health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.”
In the same Forbes cover story, it was discussed that Gates then realized that instead of birth control, the best tool to a slower population growth is reducing childhood mortality.
“In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.
“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.”
While Gates’ view on pushing for lower childhood mortality to reduce population growth is still a highly debatable subject, what cannot be argued is Gates’ intention on using vaccines to influence population growth, which is to save children’s lives to assure their parents about their survival, hence convincing them to have fewer kids.
Their intention is quite clear in the 2017 Annual Letter from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as noted by Snopes:
“Melinda: Saving children’s lives is the goal that launched our global work. It’s an end in itself. But then we learned it has all these other benefits as well. If parents believe their children will survive—and if they have the power to time and space their pregnancies—they choose to have fewer children.
Bill: When a mother can choose how many children to have, her children are healthier, they’re better nourished, their mental capacities are higher—and parents have more time and money to spend on each child’s health and schooling. That’s how families and countries get out of poverty. This link between saving lives, a lower birthrate, and ending poverty was the most important early lesson Melinda and I learned about global health.”
This is the exact opposite of what YourNewsWire.com and awarenessact.com are claiming when they said that Bill Gates want people to consent to killing humans through vaccine programs to save the overcrowded Earth. Filipino netizens were misled for believing in this fake news about Gates wanting to use vaccines to kill people. In fact, his foundation is the biggest private donor for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines.
In April 2015, Gates visited the Philippines to get updates from IRRI. He was also reported to have visited Palawan.
Sources: ( snopes.com , gmanetwork.com )
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