The Claim:
In videos being shared by many people, security specialist Gavin de Becker claims that vaccines (especially tetanus shots) have been secretly used to reduce women’s and men’s ability to have children as part of a supposed plan by the U.S., the WHO, and people like Bill Gates to lower the world’s population.
The Facts:
This idea began with a 2010 TED talk where Bill 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.” He was not talking about reducing the number of people on Earth. He was talking about lowering population growth rates by 10–15 percent.
Gates has explained many times that vaccines help slow population growth in developing countries because when parents know their children are likely to survive past age 5, they usually choose to have fewer children. Vaccines help children survive by protecting them from major killers like pneumonia and rotavirus.
Bangladesh is a great example of this idea. Bangladesh lowered its population growth rate from about 6.3 children per woman in 1971 to much fewer by 2004. The government worked hard on many things at once: a strong immunization program that kept children healthier, sanitation and clean-water efforts, more girls getting schooling, and family-planning work. These changes made families more confident that their children would survive, so they chose to have fewer children.
The conspiracy theory that vaccine companies are trying to secretly depopulate the world is not new, and it would be impossible to hide because huge numbers of people have worked on vaccines for decades.