by For a month I argued with the climate change deniers and I learnt an incredible amount about the subject. I lost interest in the climate change deniers when I realised they were sockpuppets who knew that climate change science was right, but they just loved being contrarians.Now it seems I'm at war with the anti-vaxxers, covid-19 conspiracy theorists, who say it's nothing, and the Bill Gates conspiracy theorists. Many of these people are on the left, like Whitney Webb, who has done a couple of YouTube videos spreading conspiracy theories about Bill Gates. She said how he wanted to use vaccines to depopulate the world, so I tweeted correcting her and also left comments on YouTube.Bill Gates said that vaccines could help reduce population growth, not the population. There is no welfare in
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Now it seems I'm at war with the anti-vaxxers, covid-19 conspiracy theorists, who say it's nothing, and the Bill Gates conspiracy theorists. Many of these people are on the left, like Whitney Webb, who has done a couple of YouTube videos spreading conspiracy theories about Bill Gates. She said how he wanted to use vaccines to depopulate the world, so I tweeted correcting her and also left comments on YouTube.
Bill Gates said that vaccines could help reduce population growth, not the population. There is no welfare in the third world, so people rely on their children to look after them in old age. Because many children may die due to diseases, lots of people will have big families as a safeguard. What Bill Gates was saying is that as vaccines save lives, people may opt for smaller families instead.
Population growth is said to be very high in Africa, and Bill Gates has spoken of his concern that they might outstrip their food supply, which could lead to problems for the rest of the world. He doesn't say what, but immigration could be one, plus wars could that could spill out into the rest of the world.
I agree with Bill Gates about this worry, and I'm certain he's genuinely trying to help people with his vaccination programme, but this doesn't mean I approve of his neoliberalism which he tries to influence third world countries with. Below is an excellent article criticising neoliberalism and some of Bill Gates' pro-corporate policies, which are not in the interest of people in the third world.
In one of her latest articles, McGoey highlights how the Gates Foundation has “aggressively pursued vaccination campaigns at the expense of initiatives championed by health experts in poor nations, who often call for universal healthcare strengthening, rather than what’s called ‘vertical’ disease targeting (campaigns focused on eradicating single diseases).” Although she acknowledges that not everything his foundation does is bad, and that Gates and other elites have stepped in improve diagnostic testing for coronavirus, McGoey correctly concludes that “billionaires won’t save us”. This is because billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates are the very same people who created and profited from the problems that led us to the current impasse, where global health systems are in crisis, and where 26 billionaires’ control as much as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.
Counterpunch
COVID-19: How Big Pharma and Big Philanthropy Consume the World, by MICHAEL BARKER