RFK Jr’s appointment resurrects false claims about ‘depopulation’ via vaccines

“Do you still think it’s a conspiracy theory?” reads the caption of a Facebook post shared on January 30, 2025, with a photo of a person holding up the front page of a newspaper called “The Sovereign Independent”.

Alongside a picture of Gates, the headline reads: “Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination: The Zero Carbon Solution!”

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Screenshot of the false Facebook post, taken on February 11, 2025 

Text overlaid on the image reads: “This woman is holding a newspaper she has kept since 2011. The paper contains an article by Bill Gates called ‘Depopulation through Compulsory Vaccination’. Gates thinks it will be the most ‘environmentally friendly solution’. No one gave this much thought at the time.”

The post has been shared more than a hundred times while the same claim has circulated on X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Conspiracy theories about using vaccines to reduce the world’s population are not new but they gained traction in 2020 when many countries made the Covid-19 jab compulsory for cross-border travel.

Kennedy, widely known as RFK Jr., labelled the Covid-19 vaccine “the deadliest ever made” (archived here).

He has also been criticised for promoting debunked claims linking childhood vaccines to autism and suggesting that HIV does not cause AIDS.  In addition, he has faced accusations that he stoked anti-measles vaccine sentiment in Samoa during a 2019 visit, months before a deadly outbreak.

Since his nomination to become the United States’ new health secretary under President Donald Trump, old claims about vaccines have once again swirled online. 

However, the claim that Gates called for using vaccines to reduce the world’s population is false.

What Gates said

Internet archives show that The Sovereign Independent published the article in its June 2011 issue. Its byline shows the article was penned by a writer named Rachel Windeer – not by Bill Gates, as the posts on social media claim. 

Keyword searches found that the remarks attributed to Gates in the article were taken from a speech he delivered at a TED Conference in February 2010 (archived here).

Gates spoke about his vision for the world’s future energy needs. His remarks about the global population start at 4’27” in the video of his TED address.

Gates spoke about cutting global population growth by “10 or 15 percent” to reduce carbon emissions, rather than reducing the actual population.

A transcript of his full speech can be found here (archived here).

Gates and vaccines

In 2009, Gates recommended using vaccines to reduce child mortality rates. He said since some parents choose to have enough kids to offset high child mortality, increasing the chance of a child surviving to adulthood and encouraging parents to have smaller families would create “a virtuous cycle that takes a country out of poverty” (archived here).

The Gates Foundation has repeatedly rejected the depopulation claim, including in a previous debunk published by AFP Fact Check.

“Immunization is a global health success story, saving millions of lives every year, and is one of the best health investments money can buy,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in response to AFP Fact Check's about the claim resurfacing.

The organisation also referred to a 2024 study from The Lancet showing that global immunization efforts have saved an estimated 154 million lives – or the equivalent of six lives every minute of every year – in the past 50 years (archived here).

Misinformation history

The Sovereign Independent has a history of publishing misinformation about vaccines.

Internet archives show that the newspaper published the article in its June 2011 issue.

The same edition contains reports that share false claims about vaccinations, including that jabs “have never been proven to be safe” by medical research.

An archive of the newspaper’s information page claims it “frequently draws attention to the so-called 'New World Order'”.

Alleged mandatory vaccinations are among the purported goals of the “new world order” cited by conspiracists, AFP previously reported.

However, the WHO says that vaccination policies are decided by countries and are not mandatory.

AFP Fact Check has debunked multiple claims made by Kennedy in the past, including here and here.