The Gates Vaccination Expose
The vaccination arguments can sometimes appear confusing for some people. How can a non-specialist know who's correct? True, virtually the entire medical community is in favor of vaccinations. But on the other hand, you have Marcia Angell writing that “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” After reading that, even I was starting to wonder.
Fortunately, you don't need any medical knowledge whatsoever to decide if the anti-vaxxers are really onto something, or if they are tragically deranged. All you have to do is ask them about Bill Gates, who has invested great effort into having millions of children in poor countries vaccinated.
An anti-vaxxer who posted many comments on the previous post mentioned that Bill Gates's own family pediatrician said that Gates did not have his own children immunized - clear proof that he himself knows them to be dangerous!
The only problem? It's completely fabricated. There is no record of this unnamed pediatrician saying any such thing. It seems to have first appeared on some conspiracy website, then spread like wildlife among those who are happy to believe stories which fit their beliefs, even if there isn't any evidence for them.
This does not speak well for the ability of anti-vaxxers to evaluate factual truth.
But it gets much crazier than that!
It's easy to accept that lots of people believe that vaccines are harmful. But Bill Gates?! He gave a hundred million dollars to get millions of children vaccinated!
So according to the anti-vaxxers, this is entirely the point. Bill Gates deliberately worked at getting millions of children injected with harmful vaccines, in order to make them autistic and hopefully kill as many of them as possible.
It's hard to find words for how insane this is. You just have to read a little bit about the tremendous effort and care that Bill and Melinda Gates have put into helping children, to realize how preposterous it is to propose that they actually secretly want to harm and kill as many as possible.
But it gets much crazier than that!
According to the anti-vaxxers, it's not even a secret at all. Bill Gates has been completely explicit about his desire to kill as many children as possible with vaccines. He has publicly stated that it's necessary to do so in order to reduce the world population. The anti-vaxxers cite a quote from Bill Gates at a 2019 TED Talk, in which he said that, "The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care and reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."
Of course, this isn't what Gates actually said at all. I knew that even before checking the Snopes article to see exactly how it was distorted. He wasn't saying that "if we do a really great job on killing children and health care (what a crazy juxtaposition!), we can lower the population." His point was that if parents in third-world countries can be more confident that their children will survive childhood (thanks to vaccines), then they won't have so many. As Melinda Gates said: “If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size."
But it's not just that the antivaxxers distort what Gates said. The point is that anyone who thinks for a moment that Bill Gates wants millions of children to suffer and die, and moreover, that he would openly state this in a public speech (despite at all other times arguing that vaccines are healthy), is clearly utterly out of their mind.
And you don't listen to medical advice from people who are out of their mind.
Further Reading: How Bill and Melinda Gates Are Transforming Life for Billions in the 21st Century