Authors
A clip from Bill Gates’ 2010 TED Talk has become viral after it was shared by multiple users claiming that ‘COVID19 vaccines are linked to population control.’
In the viral video, Bill Gates can be heard saying “we could lower that (population growth) by perhaps 10 or 15%.”
Ezra Levant, a journalist at Rebel News -a Canadian news portal- tweeted out the video saying, “Bill Gates on vaccines & depopulation” and quoted the billionaire saying, “(…)First we’ve got population… if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%.”
Ezra’s tweet garnered over 47,000 views and over two thousand likes within the first 15 hours of the post.
Other verified Twitter handles with tens of thousands of followers also shared the video of Gates’ 2010 and 2015 TED Talks suggesting the pandemic was orchestrated.
Archived links to the Tweets can be accessed here and here.
The claim also found its way to Facebook where several users shared an article by TechStartups -an American news portal that exclusively covers technology and startups- whose headline reads, “Bill Gates talked about using vaccines to control population growth…”
The article dated October 6 argues that “Gates is advocating for a reduction in the number of people on the planet.”
Factcheck/Verification
The viral clip is a snippet from the 27-minute and 30-second-long TED talk video titled “Innovating to zero!”
In the video, Gates talks about the adverse effects of climate change and he emphasizes ways to cut the carbon-di-oxide emission to zero.
At three minutes and 45 seconds, Gates explains that the CO2 emission is proportional to the global population along with services used by each person, the energy consumption per service, and the CO2 released per unit of energy consumed.
He further explains, in order to reduce CO2, there is a need to curb the unsustainable levels of population growth.
In this context, Gates’ said, “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.”
Thus, with the context in place, we find that Gates was referring to steps to reduce the carbon footprint. The Microsoft co-founder did not suggest the reduction in the number of existing people on the planet instead emphasized curbing the unsustainable population growth so as to reduce the global CO2 emission in the future.
Gates’ has long emphasized population control, in an interview published on his blog post –Gate Notes– in 2012 he had said lack of medical care results in poverty and bigger family sizes.
Conclusion:
A snippet from Bill Gates’ TED TALK is shared in a misleading context. He did not suggest that vaccines can be used to control the global population.
Result:
Misleading
Our Sources:
Bill Gates TED Talk, February 2010
Post on the Gates Notes blog
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