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Fact
check: No evidence Bill Gates said ‘at least 3 billion people need to die’
By
Reuters
January
29, 20213:59 PM GMT+1Updated January 29, 2021
A video
viewed thousands of times on social media attributes to Bill Gates a quote
about “sterilization and population control”. The clip shows a man saying: “In
the words of Bill Gates, at least 3 billion people need to die”. Reuters found
no evidence Gates ever made such a statement.
The Bill
and Melinda Gates Foundation confirmed to Reuters via email that this claim is
false.
An
iteration posted to Instagram on Jan. 25 ( here ) was viewed over half a
million times three days later. The clip was also shared on TikTok (
vm.tiktok.com/ZMJoRcss3/ ), Facebook (
here ) and YouTube ( here ).
The viral
clip does not feature Bill Gates, but a man identified as “Dr. Robert O. Young”
who is allegedly quoting Gates during a panel entitled “International Tribunal
for Natural Justice”, a group that has spread conspiracy theories about the
COVID-19 pandemic, news reports say ( here , here ).
The more
than 90-minute video was posted on YouTube ( youtu.be/gKjnEz5s37o?t=5584 ) on
Nov. 20, 2019.
In the
clip circulating on social media, Young says: "For the purpose of
sterilization and population control, there’s too many people on the planet we
need to get rid of. In the words of Bill Gates, at least three billion people
need to die” (audible around 1:33:03,
youtu.be/gKjnEz5s37o?t=5583 ).
Young, a
promoter of the “alkaline diet” to cure diseases (a theory discredited by
experts and explained here ), was
convicted in 2016 for practising medicine without a licence and spent several
months in jail ( here , here ).
Reuters
found no evidence that Gates ever made this or any similar statement. A Google
search of the claim brought up fact check articles debunking this allegation
and articles addressing how Gates has been a target of disinformation during
the COVID-19 pandemic.
The
alleged quote appears to be a misrepresentation of a statement Gates gave at a
TED conference in 2010 ( here ), which has been repeatedly taken out of context
(see for example here , here ). As part of a talk on reducing CO2 emissions to
zero, he said: “First, we've got population. 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. But there, we see an increase of about
1.3.”
As
previously explained by Reuters here ,
in his speech he was not suggesting the global population should be killed by
use of vaccines.
Gates has
long been a proponent of slowing unsustainable population growth ( here ) by
targeting the root causes of poverty and unrest, and told Forbes magazine in
2011 that when he first entered public health, it was to focus on contraception
( here ). When he later saw data suggesting that when mortality rates fall, so,
too, do birth rates, Gates shifted his focus from contraception to saving
people already alive. He told Forbes: “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines
once we understood that.”
Some
iterations ( here , here around
timestamp 4:33), also show Young referring to a fabricated quote attributed to
former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about “mandatory vaccination”.
Reuters previously debunked this here .
During
the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates has been a constant target of disinformation (
here , here; ). In an interview with Reuters this month here , he said he was taken aback by the volume of
“crazy” and “evil” conspiracy theories about him spreading on social media
during the pandemic and would like to explore what is behind them.
VERDICT
False.
There is no evidence Bill Gates said “at least 3 billion people need to die”.
The statement appears to be a misrepresentation of his view on slowing
population growth through improving access to healthcare, including vaccination
and contraception.
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