The Rebecca Project for Justice characterizes Gates’s African project as “A family planning strategy that unethically targets women of color to prohibit births of beautiful [Black] children, by not informing mothers of Depo-Provera’s deadly risks as mandated under US law/regulations; thus, denying women of color their inalienable right to choose and access safe reproductive health.”95
Depo-Provera came honestly to its notoriety as the tool of choice for racist eugenicists. Israel banned Depo-Provera in 2013 following a scandal in which government health workers seeking to radically reduce the number of Black births were targeting African Jews with Depo-Provera. Sharona Eliahu Chai, lawyer for the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), condemned the government policy of preventing Black Israelis from reproducing: “Findings from investigations into the use of Depo-Provera are extremely worrisome, raising concerns of harmful health policies with racist implications in violation of medical ethics.”96
In 2002, India banned this dangerous drug from all family welfare programs after a similar scandal: government officials were targeting lower-caste Indians.97 Many other nations, including Bahrain, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, prohibit the use of Depo-Provera on their nationals. European countries largely restrict the use of Depo-Provera and require full disclosure of risks for women and informed consent prior to its use. Gates and USAID have taken advantage of political disorganization in Pakistan to administer “self-inject” Depo-Provera to Muslim women. In contrast to its US counterpart, USAID, the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA) does not fund, purchase, or provide Depo-Provera for Swedish-assisted projects in developing countries.98
Sterility Vaccines / Chemical Castration
Gates’s defenders ridicule as “conspiracy theory” the suggestion that Gates, or any reputable public health authority, would use “lifesaving vaccines” as a stealth vehicle for surreptitiously rendering women infertile. But one of Gates’s earliest philanthropic undertakings was a 2002 project to administer tetanus vaccines to poor women in fifty-seven countries.99 For reasons we are about to discover, critics credibly suggest that these vaccines may have been secretly laced with a formula the Rockefeller Foundation developed to sterilize women against their will.
On November 6, 2014, four years after Gates pledged at a TED Talk to use vaccines to lower birth rates, medical researchers and doctors associated with the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops (KCCB) and the Kenya Catholic Health Commission accused WHO, UNICEF, and GAVI of secretly conducting a mass sterilization program against Kenyan women, under the veil of eradicating tetanus disease.100, 101 The Washington Post reported similar charges by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association (KCDA).102
The Catholic doctors became suspicious due to WHO’s glaring departures from the usual tetanus vaccine protocols. Normally a single tetanus vaccine provides a decade of immunity. Since men and women are equally susceptible, both sexes routinely get the vaccine. But WHO instructed Kenyan doctors to give the vaccine in five administrations, six months apart, and only to girls of childbearing years.
“The defense that the WHO intended only to target ‘maternal and neonatal tetanus’ seems odd in view of the fact that males are about as likely as females to be exposed to the bacterium which is found in the soil everywhere there are animals,”103 observed a 2011 peer-reviewed study of the controversy. The Catholic doctors also noticed other unusual features of the campaign. For starters, WHO suspiciously initiated its jab campaign not from a hospital or medical center or any of the estimated 60 local vaccination facilities, but distributed shots from the luxurious New Stanley Hotel in Nairobi—an exclusive resort out of reach to most physicians or public health officials.104 At considerable cost, a police escort accompanied the shots to vaccination sites, where police officers strictly supervised their handling by nursing staff and required clinicians to return each empty vial to WHO officials at Nairobi’s only five-star hotel under the watchful eyes of armed officers.
Four years later, in October 2019, the Kenyan Catholic Doctors’ Association accused UNICEF, GAVI, and the WHO of rendering millions of women and girls barren.105 The doctors had by then produced chemical analyses of vaccines verifying their allegations. Three independent Nairobi accredited biochemistry laboratories tested samples of the WHO tetanus vaccine, finding human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) where none should be present. In October 2014, Catholic doctors obtained six additional vials and tested them in six accredited laboratories, finding hCG in half of those samples.
In 2019, a group of independent researchers from Kenya and Great Britain led by University of British Columbia neurologist Dr. Christopher Shaw studied the charges and concluded that “the Kenya ‘anti-tetanus’ campaign was reasonably called into question by the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association as a front for population growth reduction.” The medical researchers characterized the WHO program “an ethical breach of the obligation on the side of the WHO to obtain ‘informed consent’ from those Kenyan girls and women.”106
Catholic medical personnel made similar accusations about WHO’s tetanus projects in Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Philippines. Following indignant denials of all such accusations, and obligatory denunciations against its accusers, WHO grudgingly admitted it had been developing the sterility vaccines for decades. WHO nevertheless punished the Kenyan doctors and the community officials who reported the spiked vaccine by canceling contracts for future work.107
The Sordid History of Sterility Vaccines
It wasn’t the first time that Catholic medical authorities accused the WHO of a stealth sterilization campaign against African women. As early as November 1993, Catholic publications charged that the WHO was spiking tetanus vaccines to neuter dark-skinned women globally with potent abortifacients.108 WHO denied the explosive charges.
Shaw’s research team showed that WHO and Rockefeller Foundation scientists began research on “antifertility” vaccines for “birth-control” as early as 1972, by lacing hCG with tetanus toxoid, which acts as a carrier for the hormone. That year, WHO researchers at a meeting of the US National Academy of Sciences109, 110 reported their successful creation of a “birth-control” vaccine that diminishes the βhCG essential to a successful pregnancy and causes at least temporary “infertility.” Subsequent experiments proved that repeated doses could extend infertility indefinitely.111