Social media users shared posts online featuring allegations about Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.
The post here looks like a poster of a “wanted” individual and contains 8 points on why Gates “should be stopped”.
The marks also contain opinions and various other allegations that fall outside the scope of this check.
FUNDING AND PLANNING COVID-19
The report says that Gates funded and planned the COVID-19 pandemic at Event 201 on October 19, 2019. Reuters Fact Check settled this claim earlier here.
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety teamed up with partners, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to host a pandemic table-top exercise called “Event 201”.
The event simulated an outbreak of a new zoonotic coronavirus transmitted from bats to pigs to humans and leading to a serious pandemic (here). The exercise was to ‘highlight preparation and response challenges’ that would likely arise in a very serious pandemic (here).
Asked if the exercise predicted the current pandemic, however, Johns Hopkins said: “For the scenario, we modeled a fictitious coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction” (here).
“Although our tabletop exercise contains a flashy coronavirus, the input we used to model the potential impact of that fictitious virus is not similar to nCoV-2019,” they added.
But the fact that the exercise took place is not unexpected or unusual. John Hopkins said the event was organized in light of the world seeing a “growing number of epidemic events” (here). Another simulation by WHO can be seen here.
GATES FUNDS PIRBRIGHT INSTITUTE, OWNER OF THE VIRUS PATENT
The post claims that Gates is a major funder of the Pirbright Institute in the UK and that the institute owns the patent of the COVID-19 virus. Reuters Fact Check earlier dismissed the claim that the institute has the patent for the COVID-19 vaccine here.
Pirbright is funded, according to the institute, by the Research Council for Biotechnology and Biological Sciences, which is part of the UK Research and Innovation (BBSRC UKRI). According to a statement, Pirbright is also receiving funding from a number of other organizations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Pirbright does not have a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine or for a virus.
Pirbright does have a patent, but it covers a type of attenuated coronavirus that could possibly be used as a vaccine to prevent respiratory diseases in animals. Pirbright specifies that the funding for his work on this patent does not come from the Gates Foundation.
In January 2020, Pirbright addressed this misinformation on its website. According to the institute, its research focuses mainly on respiratory diseases affecting poultry and pigs, including the infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) and the delta coronavirus. “Pirbright is not currently working with human coronavirus,” the website said. “We have not yet developed an IBV vaccine, but research is still ongoing.” (here)
PEOPLE through vaccines
The report claims that Gates funded the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline’s experimental malaria vaccine and that it killed 151 African babies while causing thousands of paralysis, seizures and convulsions.
The World Health Organization (WHO) told AFP Fact. Note here that although the malaria vaccine is associated with an increased risk of fever attacks within seven days after administration, children experiencing the attacks recovered without any long-term effects in the final trial phase. .
An article discussing the results of the Phase 3 trial of the vaccination program states that 151 children died during the trial, but that the causes of death were the same in the group that received the vaccine, and the control group. More details on the causes of death can be seen in Table 11 on page 53 here.
The report alleges that Gates’ meningitis vaccine ‘forced on African children’ caused paralysis in more than 50 children. The fact controller Africa Check settled this claim.
An article here explains that the claim began when vaccinated children became ill in the final phase of an otherwise successful vaccination campaign near Gouro, Chad. The article explains that the campaign was stopped on 11 December 2012 and that a local journalist published a story on 22 December 2012 that 40 children had become seriously ill, some with paralysis. The story was posted by an online national news channel and eventually recorded by European and American anti-wax activists.
An investigation by an international team of clinicians and epidemiologists found that there were no cases of paralysis and that the children recovered according to the article. The experts determined that the cause of illness was ‘mass psychogenic illness’, a phenomenon in which a group of people begin to feel ill at the same time. Examples of other cases of this can be seen here and here, related to vaccination campaigns taking place during political instability and mistrust.
The social media report also says that Gates’ experimental polio vaccine paralyzed 490,000 children. The WHO explains in a document: here the oral polio vaccine is safe and effective for vaccinating children against polio, with very rare occasions leading to vaccine-associated paralytic polio (VAPP) or vaccine-derived poliovirus (VDPV).
In very rare cases, a poliovirus in the vaccine can change into a form that can cause paralysis. When this form develops the ability to spread sustained person-to-person transmission and circulate in the environment, it is referred to as circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus (cVDPV).
According to a WHO database here, between 2000 and 2020 there were 17 cases of cVDPV in India. AFP Fact Check addressed these claims here.
Reuters could not find evidence that the polio vaccine has crippled about half a million children in India. It is unclear where the number came from, but a post archive has now been removed. Ph / oNRO6 with claims with a similar number was shared on April 8, 2020 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy, the cousin of former US President John F Kennedy, has been banned from Instagram for repeatedly sharing uncleared claims about COVID-19 here.
India was declared polio-free by the World Health Organization in March 2014 after an effort of almost two decades, a million million dollars – praised as one of the country’s biggest public health achievements in recent times (here).
STERILIZING WOMEN IN INDIA AND AFRICA
The report says that in 2014, Gates funded an experimental HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine on 23,000 girls in India, where seven died and suffered 1,200 side effects.
An article in Science Magazine explains here that news organizations reported the deaths of seven girls a few months after the trial.
According to the article, investigators found that five of the deaths were due to reasons unrelated to the vaccine – with a snake bite, two suicides and one malaria complication. Two other girls are dying from high fever and cerebral hemorrhage, which is probably not linked to the vaccine.
The post also claims that Gates’ $ 10 billion funding for the WHO enables them to chemically sterilize millions of Kenyan women with a tetanus vaccine. This claim is similar to another, that Gates believes in sterilization and population control, which was previously dismissed by Reuters here.
There is no evidence to support this claim, which was refuted by the fact-checkers AFP here, Africa Check here and Snopes here.
The WHO here expressed concern about the safety of the vaccine and explained that the vaccine does not contain the HCG hormone, which has been claimed to be an ingredient in this tetanus shot, which allegedly causes infertility.
JOHNS HOPKINS TEST ON GUATEMALANS
The report says Gates funded experiments by John Hopkins University that infected hundreds of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases for vaccination and drug testing.
America recalls the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study (here) and in 2010 apologized for the experiment carried out in Guatemala in the 1940s, in which US government researchers deliberately infected Guatemalan with syphilis (here).
Johns Hopkins explains on his website here. that the experiment was conducted by the U.S. government in the 1940s and that the institution did not start, fund, lead, or do it.
Since Gates was not born at the time, it would have been impossible for him to fund this experiment.
OTHER CLAIMS
Some of the allegations made in the report contain some truths – for example, the Gates Foundation has been criticized for collaborating with the agricultural giant Monsanto (which endorses genetically modified crops, here, here).
Other claims, such as the Gates Foundation’s investments in international health organizations, fall outside the scope of this fact-checking.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was a constant target of disinformation (here, here). In an interview with Reuters in January 2021 here, he said he was surprised at the amount of “crazy” and “evil” conspiracy theories about him spreading on social media during the pandemic and wanting to investigate what is behind them.
VERDICT
Untrue. Bill Gates poster contains several falsehoods.
This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our fact-checking work here.