No evidence Bill Gates talked about putting ‘vaccines in our food supply’

Tweets with thousands of shares are claiming that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said: “Vaccines in our food supply solves the problem of vaccine hesitancy.”

Posts making this claim are also being shared on Facebook, including an image that appears to show he tweeted this statement.

But there’s no evidence he ever said or tweeted this. A spokesperson for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation previously told USA Today that the image where he appeared to tweet it was fake.

Searches of his previous tweets and a record of his deleted tweets don’t show he said this either. 

One of the images on Facebook shows a screenshot of a tweet which features a link to a video with the headline: “Bill Gates Vows To Pump mRNA Into Food Supply To ‘Force-Jab’ the Unvaccinated”. That video includes a 2018 clip published by the UK Department for International Development (DFID, which has now been merged with the Foreign Office to create the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office or FCDO).

In the clip, Mr Gates says: “Well the Gates Foundation has partnered with DFID on a great number of things and among those are work we do together on livestock. Helping animals survive either by having vaccines or better genetics, helping them be more productive.”

He makes no mention of vaccinating animals in order to vaccinate those who eat them. 

Some have falsely claimed that he wanted to vaccinate animals in order to give them better genetics. Both the FCDO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation told Reuters this was not true, pointing to the fact that he did not say better genetics would be achieved through vaccination.

We’ve written multiple times about false claims made about Bill Gates, especially in relation to vaccines.

False claims about vaccines contribute to the spread of health misinformation, especially if people falsely believe influential figures are endorsing the idea of vaccines being given to the population covertly. False claims like this about what’s in our food also risk causing unnecessary alarm.

Health misinformation can cause direct damage to people’s physical or psychological health, and can put particular communities and vaccine coverage levels at risk. Health misinformation that spreads at scale can create distrust of medical professionals and distract from or undermine medical consensus and public health messaging.