A video of Italian politician Sara Cunial blasting Bill Gates as a “vaccine criminal” in speeches to parliament has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Facebook and YouTube.
The MP, who is known for her strong stance against vaccines, was expelled from the anti-establishment Five Star Movement last year after accusing the party of being in the pockets of “farming mafias” over its handling of a deadly olive tree disease., On May 15, a video\xa0combining both her speeches surfaced on social media in various countries, including in France, Germany, Pakistan and the US. Extracts from the speeches have also circulated in Facebook posts around Africa, like here, here and\xa0here., According to another\xa0Facebook post, which links to a news report\xa0by Russian state TV channel\xa0RT, the Italian lawmaker was “exercising her parliamentary privilege to blast Gates as a ‘vaccine criminal’ and globalist tool”., RT’s report, headlined: “Italian lawmaker demands Bill Gates be investigated for ‘crimes against humanity’... But WHY?”, features a YouTube video of the speech, which garnered\xa0more than a million views before it was removed., Microsoft founder Bill Gates\xa0regularly comes under attack from conspiracy theorists who have accused him of plotting to reduce the global population through deadly vaccines or even of creating the new coronavirus. The tech giant has pledged more than $300 million to efforts to fight to pandemic., "AFP Fact Check spotted at least three false claims in Sara Cunials statement.", Two minutes into the address,\xa0Cunial\xa0claims that Gates is planning to reduce the world population. She\xa0refers to a speech the billionaire gave in 2018 where he purportedly predicted a\xa0pandemic, which was later simulated last October in an exercise called\xa0“Event 201”\xa0organised by the John Hopkins Center for Health Security, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation\xa0and the World Economic Forum., The lawmaker says in Italian:\xa0“For decades, Gates has been working on depopulation policy and dictatorial control plans on global politics, aiming to obtain the primacy on agriculture, technology and energy.”, “Gates said, I quote exactly from his speech: ‘If we do a good job on vaccines, health and reproduction, we can reduce the world population by 10-15 percent’. And again: ‘Only a genocide can save the world’”., The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security dismissed claims that it predicted the COVID-19 outbreak, and the first part of the quote Cunial cites was shared\xa0in a misleading context. She actually pulled\xa0the quote from a 2010 speech delivered by Bill Gates in an event unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic., AFP Fact Check ran a Google search for keywords from the quote attributed to Gates and traced it to a speech he gave in February 2010\xa0on reducing carbon emissions., , “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, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent,” he said. Gates was talking about cutting global population growth by\xa0“10 or 15 percent” in order to reduce carbon emissions, rather than reducing the actual population., The video does not show him saying “only a genocide can save the world”. AFP Fact Check has found no public record of him ever making this statement., How do we reduce population growth? By reducing infant mortality. I was surprised too. http://t.co/YnebvxN3, Gates recommended\xa0developing vaccines to reduce child mortality rates, thereby increasing the chance of a child surviving to adulthood and encouraging parents to have smaller families that would\xa0benefit from government resources, saying “a virtuous cycle begins that takes a country out of poverty.”, In her speech, Cunial also accused Gates of using vaccines to\xa0 “sterilise millions of women in Africa”., This is an old rumour\xa0debunked several times by international fact-checking organisations, including Africa Check and Snopes., The rumour first emerged in Kenya in 2014, when Catholic bishops\xa0said that a tetanus immunisation programme aimed at women of childbearing age was an attempt to control births, and four years after Bill and Melinda Gates pledged a $10 billion funding to WHO for a decade-long vaccine push., The Catholic bishops claimed that laboratory assessments conducted on some Tetanus Toxoid vaccine samples submitted for analysis were found to contain pregnancy hormone Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) which “develops antibodies against tetanus and HCG so that if a woman’s egg becomes fertilised, her own natural HCG will be destroyed rendering her permanently infertile.”, But the World Health Organization has dismissed the presence of HCG in the vaccine and confirmed that it is safe. “The vaccine has been used in 52 countries, to immunize 130 million women to protect them and their newborn babies from tetanus,” WHO said in November 2014. “There is no HCG hormone in tetanus toxoid vaccines.”, "Furthermore, the head\xa0of one of the laboratories that carried out the analysis\xa0told Kenyas\xa0Daily Nation\xa0newspaper that the test results had been misinterpreted, and that the tetanus vaccine\xa0did not contain the pregnancy hormone.", Kenyan health authorities have also refuted the allegations which it describes as “a baseless pronouncement not backed by any scientific evidence, ill intended to cause fear and despondency among Kenyans in the uptake of much needed essential health services”., Cunial also claimed\xa0that Gates “caused a polio epidemic that paralysed 500,000 children in India”., The claim appears to originate from an Instagram post\xa0on April 7, 2020 by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former US\xa0president John F. Kennedy and a leader of the World Mercury Project, which advocates against mandatory vaccination., “Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating vaccine-strain polio epidemic that paralyzed 496,000 children between 2000 and 2017,”\xa0the post reads., However, the claim is misleading, and has previously been\xa0debunked by AFP Fact Check.\xa0Official statistics show only a tiny number of cases in which the oral polio vaccine directly resulted in Indian children contracting the disease., , Copyright © AFP 2017-2020.  All rights reserved.  Users can access and consult this website and use the share features available for personal, private, and non-commercial purposes.  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Italian politician spreads false claims about Bill Gates in parliament speeches | AFP Fact Check