Why Bill Gates faces a storm of conspiracy theories: Ivo Vegter

Key topics:Gates misrepresented by Covid-era depopulation conspiracy theories.He promotes population control via healthcare, not mass death.Philanthropy focuses on vaccines, poverty, and sustainable energy..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.The seventh BizNews Conference, BNC#7, is to be held in Hermanus from March 11 to 13, 2025. The 2025 BizNews Conference is designed to provide an excellent opportunity for members of the BizNews community to interact directly with the keynote speakers, old (and new) friends from previous BNC events – and to interact with members of the BizNews team. Register for BNC#7 here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ivo Vegter*.It seems no good deed goes unpunished when it comes to Bill Gates, who has become a bit of a voodoo doll for cranks wearing tinfoil hats.In the years since Bill Gates stepped back from his responsibilities at Microsoft, which began in 2008, he has become the epicentre of numerous conspiracy theories.At first, the outlandish claims were fringe theories. They became massively amplified during the Covid-19 pandemic, however, because of Gates’s involvement in the development and charitable distribution of vaccines.A lot of the original claims have been taken down, but this video gives a taste of the sort of thing that was going around at the time. It features a deceptively edited video which suggests that his one wish is a decline in the global population.In fact, if you listen to the 2010 talk from which these clips were taken, his “one wish” was the invention of an energy source that costs half of our existing sources, with zero carbon emissions.Ex-con quackIn 2019, a discredited naturopath, Robert Oldham Young, who promoted quack diets, had been to prison for practising medicine without a licence, and had to pay $105 million in damages to a cancer patient he treated with baking soda, gave a talk at a crackpot convention called the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.It was organised by Sacha Stone, a New Age influencer who sold fake £339 USB sticks that supposedly contain a “holographic nano-layer catalyser” that protects buyers against 5G radiation. The “chief justice” of this “tribunal” was a disbarred Australian lawyer. The event was scammer central, preying on the ignorant, the gullible, the desperate and the paranoid.In this talk, Young said: “In the words of Bill Gates, at least three billion people need to die. So we’ll just start off in Africa, we’ll start doing our research there, and we’ll eliminate most of the Africans because they’re deplorable. They’re worthless. They’re not part of this world economy.”In 2021, a South African user of what was then Twitter posted a clip of this speech. (The account appears to have been deleted, but then reinstated without any posts or followers.)This meshed with the paranoia of the vaccine disinformation brigade, who whipped up fear that Gates’s charitable contributions to the World Health Organisation and his promotion of vaccines in developing countries could be spun into a “depopulation” plot..Read More:.The Gates-way drug – Bill Gates suddenly slams mRNA shots after selling BioNTech stock with 10X gains.Anyone who said otherwise was denounced as being hoodwinked, or bought off, or part of the conspiracy. Implausibly, the conspiracy must have involved millions of officials, doctors and nurses, and thousands of professional journalists, all being prepared to lay their professional reputations on the line for… Bill Gates.The formulaIn truth, what Gates said was something entirely different. Gates has only ever spoken about reducing population growth, not reducing population..He posited a formula for carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), which consisted of population (P), multiplied by goods and services consumed (S), multiplied by the energy per unit of service (E), multiplied by the carbon dioxide emitted per unit of energy (C).He then said that at least one of these numbers would have to get pretty close to zero.“First, we’ve got population,” he 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.”The ignorant, the frauds and the fear-mongers misinterpreted – nay, disinterpreted – this as a depopulation plot centred upon Africa, delivered through healthcare channels and in particular vaccines.If you listen to (or read) the rest of the talk, he concludes that the global population will inevitably grow, and that the amount of services consumed will likely double, because that’s how you raise people out of poverty. He says the “top billion” might be able to reduce their consumption, but the rest of the world won’t, and shouldn’t be expected to.Where he does see the potential for reducing the value of the CO2 formula is in energy efficiency, where innovation is very important, and in reducing the carbon output of energy sources, primarily by going nuclear. The last factor is the one that he thinks should be brought to, or close to, zero.Population growthIf you’ve heard him speak on other occasions, his meaning in relation to population becomes very clear. For example, this is from an interview conducted in 2012:“Well, the population growth issue, at the global level, is not that daunting. That is, the population, percentage-wise, is growing slower today than in the past. And so it will actually peak out. The problem is that the population is growing the fastest where people are less able to deal with it. So it’s in the very poorest places that you’re going to have a tripling in population by 2050.“And so their ability to feed, educate, provide jobs, stability, protect the environment in those locations means, they’re faced with an almost impossible problem, Northern Nigeria, Yemen, Chad. And so what we need to do is take this aid generosity and this innovation and go into those places – offer the women better tools, where they want to space birthing or have a smaller family size, and improve health, because it’s amazingly as children survive, parents feel like they’ll have enough kids to support them in their old age. And so they choose to have less children.“Niger, right now, it’s still seven children per family. Whereas in the richer countries you’re often at a stable point which is 2.1 or even less. And so it’s really an acute problem in a certain number of places. And we’ve got to make sure that we help out with the tools now so that they don’t have an impossible situation later.”His argument is that if infant mortality goes down (thanks to vaccines and other medical interventions), and women’s healthcare improves, people will choose to have fewer children.Personally, I’m not so concerned about fertility rates. I care about about women’s rights and freedoms, and their power to control their own reproductive destinies. I’m also concerned about economic policy, which is what determines the prosperity of a country and moderates the growth of a population.We can quibble around the margins, but I consider Gates’s healthcare interventions to be highly desirable.TwistedAfter Gates immersed himself in the philanthropic efforts of what was then the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve public health, especially in the developing world, he gave a talk in 2015 to warn that the world wasn’t adequately prepared for a major pandemic, and that such a pandemic would probably involve a respiratory virus like H1N1.His foundation was also involved with a training exercise designed to prepare public health officials for a possible pandemic in October 2019.When a global coronavirus outbreak actually happened soon after, conspiracy theorists saw this as evidence that Gates and a group of shadowy powermongers had planned the pandemic all along.“Plandemic”, they called it, thinking it made them sound clever. It didn’t. It marked them as idiots.Gates’s words have been twisted, taken out of context, and spliced together to suggest false takes that completely misrepresented his views.For someone who is supposedly plotting “depopulation”, starting in Africa, he sure is very open about his plans, taking every opportunity to explain his philanthropic efforts.His efforts are also startlingly ineffective. If vaccines had really been aimed at “depopulation”, designed to wipe three billion people off the face of the planet, they backfired spectacularly, accidentally saving over 80 million lives around the world.Distrust and disagreementI’m no fan of Gates. While I acknowledge his company’s achievements in terms of making computing accessible to billions, I stay as far as I can from the products he foisted upon the world.(I haven’t used Microsoft products as my daily driver since 2003. Even back in the 1990s, I often used alternative operating systems such as Sun Solaris, IBM OS/2 or Mandrake Linux, and alternative productivity applications such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.)I distrust Microsoft’s business practices. I disagree that governments have to curb its monopoly abuses, because ultimately the market will do so, but I don’t disagree that Microsoft abused its monopoly, to the detriment of its customers and the broader market.I don’t share Gates’s fear of carbon dioxide, nor of overpopulation. And I certainly don’t look too kindly upon Gates’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, even if it was just to solicit philanthropic contributions, as Gates claims.My point is, I’m not defending Gates because I like him. I don’t.I’m defending him because I do share his enthusiasm for innovation, efficiency, abundance, and non-polluting energy. As a believer in free markets, I much prefer seeing the world’s problems solved through private philanthropy than through the laws, regulations, healthcare, education or welfare of governments.I also think the conspiracy theories against Gates are both stupid and harmful.Gates’s sinsGates’s sins are many, but his biggest sin is that after becoming the richest man in the world, he turned around in his mid-fifties and decided to give it all away again.With a group of other billionaires, including George Soros, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller and Ted Turner, he formed the “Good Club” back in 2009, after the global financial crisis. Its goal? To deploy their wealth to help save the world.Both individually, and in concert with others, Gates has focused his energy on ways to spend his resources to solve the world’s problems. The primary goal of his foundation – since his divorce known as just the Gates Foundation – is to improve healthcare and reduce poverty. His first target was to improve nutrition and help combat malaria in Africa.Conspiracy theorists think this is sinister. I don’t.I might (and often do) disagree with the political views of some of these philanthropists. I might (and sometimes do) disagree with the policy details of the interventions they support.But it is one thing to sometimes disagree with them, and another entirely to consider the most generous philanthropic endeavours the world has ever seen as somehow being evil.Can’t winBillionaires like Gates can’t win: they become billionaires, and people call them evil. Then they give it all away again, only to get smeared as being evil all over again.If you believe Gates is a force for evil in the world, I’m afraid you’ve fallen for propaganda spread either by socialists, who just hate the rich, or by thoroughly disreputable scoundrels.All it takes is to spend time listening to Gates himself to realise that this is not a man with evil intent. He might have a bit of a messiah complex, but that’s not a bad thing in someone who once was the world’s richest person. (He’s only 12th, these days.)Gates recently vowed to give away all his wealth in the next 20 years. In explaining why, he cites Andrew Carnegie, one of the original great philanthropists, who wrote: “the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced”.“I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world,” Gates wrote in May. “And on December 31, 2045, the foundation will close its doors permanently.”The goals of this accelerated philanthropy timeline are threefold: to ensure no mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause; the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases; and hundreds of millions of people break free from poverty, putting more countries on a path to prosperity.This is what the conspiracy theorists call “evil”.The correct response to this generosity is not to vilify the man. The proper response is to say thank you, and to tip your hat to the transformative power of free markets that made it all possible..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission.

Why Bill Gates faces a storm of conspiracy theories: Ivo Vegter

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