Posts claiming to show an old newspaper article written by Bill Gates entitled “depopulation through forced vaccination” are being shared again on social media.

But as we’ve explained before, Mr Gates did not write this and the real article was written based on a quote attributed to him, which appears to have been taken out of context.

The posts show two different images of someone holding up a copy of a newspaper called The Sovereign Independent. The main article on the front page features a photo of Bill Gates next to the headline “Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination: The Zero Carbon Solution!”

An accompanying caption with the posts says: “This woman is holding a newspaper that she has kept since 2011. The paper contains an article by Bill Gates called ‘Depopulation Through Forced Vaccination’, as it will be the most ‘environmentally friendly solution.’ This article can’t be found anywhere now.”

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Bill Gates did not write the article pictured. An archived version of that paper, dated June 2011, names someone else as the writer. We can find no evidence Mr Gates has written or said anything about depopulation through forced vaccines.

The front page includes a quote next to Mr Gate’s photo. It says: “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 services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent.”

While the quote is genuine, it was taken from a TED Talk [4:23 seconds] that Mr Gates gave in 2010 where he talks about ways of reducing global carbon emissions.

He was not speaking about using vaccines to kill people. He was actually referring to the idea that improved healthcare would lower the risk of death before adulthood and would therefore encourage parents to have fewer children.

He has explained this view before and reiterated it in a 2018 video on his own YouTube channel. This indicates the quote was about slowing the growth of the world population through improved healthcare, not reducing the population that exists now.

We also wrote about this TED Talk quote being misunderstood before in 2021.

We have previously fact checked other viral misinformation about Mr Gates, including a deepfake of him talking about “water lockdowns” and false claims that a vaccine programme he supported introduced autism to Vietnam.