Bill Gates did not write an article about using ‘forced vaccines’ for depopulation

A photo being shared on social media claims to show an article written by Bill Gates in 2011 headlined “Depopulation through forced vaccination: the zero carbon solution!”. But Mr Gates did not write this. 

The photo shows someone holding a newspaper called The Sovereign Independent with the article on its front page alongside a photo of Mr Gates. 

Overlaid text says: “This woman is holding a newspaper that she has kept since 2011. The paper contains an article by Bill Gates called ‘Depopulation through Compulsory Vaccination’. Gates thinks it would be the most ‘environmentally friendly solution’. No one gave it much thought at the time.” One Facebook post sharing the photo has almost 1,800 shares. 

But Mr Gates did not write this article, and we can find no evidence he’s ever written or said anything about using forced vaccines for depopulation. An archived version of the paper, which is from June 2011, shows the article was actually written by Rachel Windeer. 

The front page also includes a quote next to Mr Gates’s photo, which is more visible in the archived version. It says: “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.” 

This has been captioned: “Billy ‘The Kid Killer’ Gates”, which suggests it has been interpreted as Mr Gates planning to use vaccines to “lower” the population.  

While this is a genuine quote from Mr Gates, it appears to have been misunderstood. The quote comes from a TED talk [4:23 seconds] by Mr Gates in 2010 about reducing global carbon dioxide emissions to zero. 

He was not speaking about using vaccines to kill people. He was actually referring to the idea that improved healthcare would lower the risk of death, thereby encouraging parents to have fewer children. This would slow world population growth, not decrease the current size of the population, which he has explained before. We wrote about this quote being misunderstood in 2021.

The charitable organisation that Mr Gates and his ex-wife started, the Gates Foundation, outlined this relationship between the child mortality rate and the birth rate in its annual letter in 2014, saying: “When children are well-nourished, fully vaccinated, and treated for common illnesses like diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia, the future gets a lot more predictable. Parents start making decisions based on the reasonable expectation that their children will live.”

This edition of the Sovereign Independent also included articles and features on frequently debunked conspiracy theories about subjects such as the collapse of World Trade Center 7 on 9/11, a ‘New World Order', and ‘chemtrails'. 

We could not find any further editions of the Sovereign Independent online, and the web domain shown in the paper is now available to buy. A company called the Sovereign Independent News Limited reportedly dissolved.   

There is a great deal of online misinformation about Mr Gates, including false claims that he funded a company that caused a malaria ‘outbreak’ in the US, was involved in the development of cow additive Boaver, and that he plans to “euthanise billions” by attacking the global food supply to create a market for a bird flu vaccine.