Pandemic Timeline

Conspiracies

Bill Gates says vaccines are for population control.

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In this TED Talk, Bill Gates mentions vaccines as a potential population control mechanism to keep population DOWN. This would be antithetical to the original purpose of vaccines, which was to preserve life. The general theme of the talk is on climate change and how to reduce emission of CO2. Comments about population begin at about 4:25.

Bill Gates’ plan to eradicate disease stems from a bold concept: The demographic theories of Thomas Malthus, generally accepted for the past two centuries, are wrong. Specifically, that subsistence eventually translates into population growth, and population growth eventually translates into misery.

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So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health—their eponymous foundation would come into being in two years—they focused on birth control, funding a Johns Hopkins effort to use computers to help women in the developing world learn about contraception. The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?

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That same epiphany for his public health philanthropy came even earlier. Bill’s dad had set up a dinner at Seattle’s posh Columbia Tower Club with the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). While the meeting started with birth control—among other efforts, PATH taught Chinese condom makers to test their products before shipping them—Gates began consuming data that startled him. 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.

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In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.

— Forbes

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