Debunked: The so-called 'doctor' claiming Bill Gates wants to kill 3 billion people

Debunked: The so-called 'doctor' claiming Bill Gates wants to kill 3 billion people
Does Bill Gates really want to eliminate 3 billion people, most of them African, to decrease the global population? That’s what controversial American homeopathic doctor Robert Young claimed in a video that recently emerged on social media. It turns out that Young and the organisation that held the conference where he made his claims have a history of spreading unfounded conspiracy theories.

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The video excerpt, which lasts about 30 seconds, circulated widely on Twitter, shocking and angering many users. Someone shared it with our team via WhatsApp, where it is also circulating widely. The video shows Young at a conference held by the International Tribunal for Natural Justice (ITNJ), an organisation that claims to function as some kind of court.

"Apparently Africans are deplorable and worthless, but I can [be] sure that Africa's resources are not ‘worthless,’” posted this social media user.

In this excerpt, Young claims that the founder of Microsoft said that 3 billion people need to be eliminated from earth, starting with Africans:

"For the purpose of sterilisation and population control, there are too many people on the planet we need to get rid of. In the words of Bill Gates, 3 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 are deplorable, they are worthless.

We ran a search on Google and found the International Tribunal for Natural Justice’s YouTube channel, where this excerpt was first posted. The excerpt comes from a longer video – which lasts over an hour and a half –that was posted online on November 20, 2019.

The excerpt that was circulating on Twitter comes from this video. It appears at 33’40”.

Later in the conference (at 1h36 and 40 seconds) Young adds: "These are not my words, they are Bill Gates’ words. Just Google ‘Bill Gates and depopulation and sterilisation’ and you’ll hear out of his own mouth the plan."

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, both Bill Gates and the foundation that he created with his wife, Melinda Gates, have been the subject of various conspiracy theories. In the video above, Young is likely referring to a statement made by the American philanthropist during a Ted Talk in 2010, but Young has completely skewed his words and taken them out of their context.

Our team looked up what Bill Gates actually said during that talk, which was about how to achieve carbon neutrality. He shows the audience an equation, showing how many people there are in the world and how much energy each person uses as well as other factors. He examines each factor one by one, beginning with population.

"The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by about 10 or 15% But there we see an increase of about 1.3,” Gates says, breaking down the formula.

To be clear – it’s not the global population that the American billionaire wants to reduce by 10 to 15%, but the population growth.

Gates believes that we should work to slow population growth in the poorest countries so that they can develop and get themselves on a path to economic growth. Gates believes that reducing infant mortality in the poorest countries can help reduce rampant population growth. The idea may seem paradoxical but Gates believes that parents won’t feel a need to have so many children if those they have are healthy and expected to survive.

So, who is Robert Young?

The video circulating online features Robert Young, the controversial figure who is spreading this conspiracy theory about Gates, as well as a controversial organisation, the International Tribunal for Natural Justice.

Young is a homeopathic doctor in the United States. He advocates for only natural medicine to be used against serious illnesses, like cancer. In 2016, he was sentenced to prison for illegal medical practice.

The International Tribunal for Natural Justice is an organisation based in the United Kingdom that often shares conspiracy theories. Members claim, for example, that 5G contributes to the spread of Covid-19, which has never been proved.

Robert David Steele, one of the members of this so-called "tribunal", claims that he is a former member of the CIA. In an interview from 2017, he claimed that American space agency NASA kidnapped his children and enslaved them on Mars.