Population and Sterilization Vaccines
Early twentieth-century America saw the snowballing popularity of eugenics, a racist pseudoscience that aspired to eliminate human beings deemed “unfit” in favor of the Nordic stereotypes. Twenty-seven state governments enshrined elements of the philosophy as official policy by enacting forced sterilization and segregation laws and marriage restrictions. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt laws requiring sterilization of intellectually challenged Americans. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans.”50
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s keen interest in eugenics colored his passion for population control. The oil baron scion joined the American Eugenics Society and served as trustee of the Bureau of Social Hygiene. The Rockefeller Foundation dispatched hefty donations in the 1920s and early 1930s to hundreds of German researchers, including those conducting Hitler’s notorious “twins studies” at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin.51 The Rockefeller Foundation curtailed donations to Nazi Germany’s medical institutions before Pearl Harbor, but Rockefeller’s success promoting the eugenics movement had already captivated Adolf Hitler. “Now that we know the laws of heredity,” Hitler told a fellow Nazi, “it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”52
In the early 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted fertility studies in India that historian Matthew Connolly characterizes as an example of “American social science at its most hubristic.” In one of the collaborations with the Harvard School of Public Health and India’s Ministry of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation studied 8,000 tribal people in seven villages in the Khanna section of Punjab to determine whether contraceptive tablets could dramatically reduce fertility rates.53 According to Linsey McGoey, “The villagers were treated like lab specimens, subjected to monthly questioning but otherwise ignored.”54
Rockefeller’s researchers did not initially inform the Punjabis that their pills would prevent women from bearing children. McGoey describes the villagers as “shocked,” “dismayed,” and “resentful” to learn that the medication they credulously consumed was intended to render them infertile: “Some were incensed by the effort to limit their future progeny.”55
Over the next two decades, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted frequent antifertility programs in India and elsewhere, earning the growing animosity of physicians, human rights activists, and poverty specialists who criticized the foundation for focusing on population growth while ignoring the realities of persistent poverty that makes large families so indispensable to Indian and African villagers.56
“Today,” McGoey adds, “the Gates Foundation is pouring money into experimental medical trials that are facing criticism similar to those directed at the [Rockefeller Foundation’s] Khanna study. Like earlier philanthropic foundations, The Gates Foundation has the financial and political clout to intervene in foreign nations with relative impunity, and to remain unfazed when the experiments it funds go awry.”57
Gates’s fetish for reducing population is a family pedigree. His father, Bill Gates Sr., was a prominent corporate lawyer and civic leader in Seattle with a lifelong obsession for “population control.” Gates Sr. sat on the national board of Planned Parenthood, a neo-progressive organization founded in 1916 by the racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger to promote birth control and sterilization and to purge “human waste”58 and “create a race of thoroughbreds.”59 Sanger said she hoped to purify the gene pool by “eliminating the unfit” persons with disabilities—preventing such persons from reproducing60 by surgical sterilization or other means.
In 1939, Sanger created and directed the racist Negro Project, which strategically co-opted Black ministers in leadership roles to promote contraceptives to their congregations. Sanger stated in a letter to her eugenics colleague, Clarence Gamble (of Procter & Gamble), “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”61
“When I was growing up, my parents were always involved in various volunteer things,” Gates told Bill Moyers in 2003. “My dad was head of Planned Parenthood. And it was very controversial to be involved with that.”62
Overpopulation, Gates’s father told Salon in a 2015 interview, was “an interest he’s had since he was a kid.”63 In 1994, the elder Gates formed the William H. Gates Foundation (the family’s first), focused on reproductive and child health in the developing world. Population control was an enduring preoccupation of his son’s philanthropy from its inception.
Gates has made a long parade of public statements and investments that reflect his deep dread of overpopulation. He describes himself as an admirer and proponent of the population doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, whom Gates describes as “the world’s most prominent environmental Cassandra,” meaning a prophet who accurately predicts misfortune or disaster.
By the way, I share Gates’s fear that if humanity persists in juxtaposing exponential population expansion atop linear resource growth, we will all land in a nightmarish Malthusian dystopia. I’m troubled, however, by his apparent comfort in using coercive and mendacious tactics to trick poor people into dangerous and unwanted contraceptive programs. The proven paths to zero population growth are the mitigation of poverty and empowerment of women. Women with alternative career opportunities seldom choose the heavy and hazardous burden of serial maternity. Virtually every nation with a stable middle class has fertility below replacement rates. But Gates’s careless public statements and the programs that he habitually funds suggest that Gates has involved himself in sketchy stealth campaigns to sterilize dark-skinned and marginalized women without their informed consent—including by the deceptive use of dangerous sterility vaccines.
On February 20, 2010, less than one month after he famously committed $10 billion to the WHO, Bill Gates suggested in his “Innovating to Zero” TED Talk in Long Beach, California, that reducing world population growth could be done in part with “new vaccines”:64
The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion [here he is almost quoting Bryant et al.]. 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 . . .65, 66