Gates’s defenders—and the Gates-subsidized “Fact Checker” organizations—scoff at critics who interpret literally Gates’s 2010 statement that he hoped to use vaccines to reduce population. They explain that Gates intended, by this inartful construct, to suggest that lifesaving vaccines will allow more infants to survive to adulthood, thereby reassuring impoverished parents that they need not have so many children. But this hypothesis rests on the sketchy premise that his vaccines reduce child mortality—a proposition that Gates has never demonstrated and that current science does not support. His peculiar choice of words naturally fueled speculation that he was engaging in a premeditated campaign to use vaccines to sterilize women. His questionable antics in promoting antifertility drugs and WHO’s widespread use of stealth sterility vaccines credibly fuel such sentiments.
Depo-Provera: A Cruel Irony
Population control has been the central preoccupation of the Gates Foundation since its inception. In 1999, Gates’s $2.2 billion commitment to the UN Population Fund doubled the size of the Gates Foundation.67 The same year, he funded, with a $20 million contribution, the founding of the Johns Hopkins Center for Population.68
In 2017, the Gates Foundation adopted the goal of administering contraceptives to 214 million women in poor countries.69 Gates’s contraceptive of choice is the long-term infertility agent Depo-Provera. Population planners have administered Depo-Provera primarily to poor and Black women in the United States since its invention in 1967. In the United States, 84 percent of Depo-Provera users are Black, and 74 percent are low-income.70 Depo-Provera’s biggest promoter, Planned Parenthood, specifically targets Blacks71 and Latinas72 in its marketing campaigns. UN data demonstrate that Depo-Provera is seldom administered to White or affluent women or girls in the United States or Europe.
Depo-Provera is a powerful poison, with a devastating inventory of wretched side effects: Under federal law, the Depo-Provera label must bear FDA’s most stringent Black Box warning—due to its potential to cause fatal bone loss. Furthermore, women have reported both missed periods and excessive bleeding; blood clots in arms, legs, lungs, and eyes; stroke; weight gain; ectopic pregnancy; depression; hair loss; decreased libido; and permanent infertility.73 Some studies have associated Depo-Provera with dramatic increases (200 percent) in breast cancer risk.74 The FDA warns women not to take Depo-Provera for longer than two years, but Gates’s program prescribes at least a four-year course—or indefinitely—for African women and goes to great lengths to avoid warning Black women about the concoction’s many drawbacks.75
Between 1994 and 2006, Bill & Melinda Gates teamed with the Rockefeller and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, the Population Council, and USAID to fund a seminal family-planning experiment administering Depo-Provera to approximately 9,000 impoverished women in the town of Navrongo and districts of Ghana.76 (Though USAID’s stated underlying principles for family planning are “volunteerism and informed choice,” it hasn’t always worked out that way.)
A disturbing 2011 exposé of the collaboration by the Rebecca Project for Justice, “The Outsourcing of Tuskegee: Nonconsensual Research in Africa,” documented how Gates’s researchers lied to the Navrongo women, telling them that they were receiving “routine healthcare” and/or “social observations”—never informing them that they were part of a population control experiment.77 Gates’s researchers violated US research laws by failing to administer informed consent forms to the women they injected with Depo-Provera. Nor did they obtain institutional review board (IRB) approval for a human experiment that lasted an extraordinary six years. Under direction of Gates’s PI, Dr. James Phillips, and his fellow Pfizer and Gates’s PIs, deliberately fabricated and falsified research data to fraudulently “prove” Depo-Provera safe.78 Based on such “proofs,” in 2011, Gates expanded his project to fund Depo-Provera programs for some 12 million women across sub-Saharan Africa.79,80
That same year, 2011, a study by a another prestigious BMGF & NIH-funded research team from Gates’s own Washington School of Public Health published an article in Lancet Infectious Diseases, Heffron et al. (2012), reporting that African women who used injectable Depo-Provera were much more likely to acquire HIV/AIDS compared to untreated women. Depo-Provera injections double a woman’s risk of contracting and transmitting HIV.81 This result was not an enormous surprise. For twenty-four years, diverse studies have shown that Depo-Provera thins the vaginal wall, easing transmission of HIV. Furthermore, the researchers found Depo-Provera exacerbates the rates of HIV/AIDS infections to a recipient’s sexual partners. Despite her funding from Gates, the study’s lead author, Dr. Renee Heffron, and her fellow researchers recommended informing HIV-infected women of Depo-Provera’s grave risks and to use alternative non-progesterone-based contraceptives: “Women should be counseled about potentially increased risk of HIV-1 acquisition and transmission.”82 The confirmation of the risk by his own scientists posed an obvious conundrum for Gates since it pitted his passion for population control against his avowed commitment to end the spread of HIV in Africa. Population, it turns out, trumps HIV-prevention in Bill Gates’s catechism.
Without offering any scientific research to substantiate their claims, Gates’s deputies, a cabal of extreme population control advocates linked to Gates, worked with Pfizer intermediaries to viciously attack Heffron’s research findings. The critics included BMGF, Planned Parenthood, the UN, Ronald Gray of the Gates-funded Johns Hopkins University, James Shelton of USAID’s Office of Population, and others.
Under these fierce attacks by Gates’s minions in the medical cartel, Dr. Heffron and her research team courageously stood their ground and retained their professional integrity. The Lancet published Heffron’s withering response. Dr. Heffron pointed out that her attackers cited no convincing science and that the two recent studies—by Heffron and the WSPH team—capped a quarter-century of published research documenting increased HIV risk among women taking Depo-Provera.83