Bill Gates: Vaccines Can Help Decrease Surplus Population

  
In a stunning revelation of what had previously been suggested by, so called, "conspiracy theorists", Bill Gates acknowledged that there could be a connection between vaccinations and population reduction.

I was ridiculed and mocked last November when I made the suggestion that certain types of vaccines might actually play a key role in reducing the number of people on the planet.

But that was before the founder of Microsoft joined the bandwagon and acknowledged the connection.

Only, Bill thinks it's a good thing and I think it's a bad thing.

Echoing Thomas Malthus and the social Darwinism of the last century, Gates reduced human survival to a matter of algebra. In remarks made to the Technology, Entertainment and Design 2010 Conference in Long Beach, California, his assessment of the planet’s problem was remarkably simple: CO2 (total population emitted CO2 per year) = P (people) x S (services per person) x E (average energy per service) x C (average CO2 emitted per unit of energy)

After presenting this equation, Gates explained that the goal was to “look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero." While discussing ‘P’, he said, “Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, healthcare, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent."

That's right. Rather than leading to more life, which was the original purpose of both vaccines and healthcare, they will lead to less. (If it seems unusual that “healthcare” would be cited as a way of limiting the human population, one needs only consider the 1990 Tetanus scandal, when the WHO secretly sterilized three million woman who thought they were merely being vaccinated against Tetanus.)

 

Time to Decrease the Surplus Population?

 

The larger issue is broader than vaccines. We should be concerned about an emerging ideology which says that in order to save the planet we must reduce the number of human beings. Bill Gates is not alone in thinking this. On 10 December, 2009, 73 members of the House sent a letter to the White House urging the President to add one billion dollars in funding for international family planning to his 2011 budget. Advocates of family planning are hardly a new phenomenon. What was interesting about this letter, however, is that the letter cited ‘climate change’ as a reason to advocate lower birth rates. “Family planning”, members of the house wrote, “should be part of larger strategies for climate change mitigation and adaption. Slower population growth will make reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions easier to achieve.”

The 73 Congressmen who signed that letter were echoing an impressive array of Western organizations who have recently urged us to look at population control as a solution to climate problems. .This includes the Sierra Club, The United Nations Population Fund, the Population Connection and The National Wild Life Federation. The latter organization has written on their website that
 

“Rapid and unchecked human population growth and the resulting increases in resource consumption lie at the heart of most, if not all, environmental problems. Global warming is no exception. The unprecedented increase in human numbers is paralleled by the highest levels of fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas production in history.”

 

Save the Planet with a One-Child-Only Policy

 

Despite the surge of attention to the alleged link between population growth and global warming, it was left to the Chinese to broach the subject at the Copenhagen conference on climate change.

The Chinese government’s delegation at the conference argued that their own one-child-only-policy should “serve as a model for integrating population programs into the framework of climate change adaptation.”

Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China population program told other delegates that China’s policy of forced population control “has made a great historic contribution to the well-being of society.”

The communist delegates cited the United Nation’s own 2009 State of World Population report, which suggests that if the global population could remain at 8 billion by the year 2050 (it is currently projected to increase to just over 9 billion), “it might result in 1 billion to 2 billion fewer tons of carbon emissions”.

Though China leads the world in CO2 emissions, the red nation has been praised for their contribution to the world’s ecology. Representative of the United Nations Population Fund, Sven Burmester, said, “China has had the most successful family planning policy in the history of mankind in terms of quantity and with that, China has done mankind a favor.”

Canada’s Financial Post also praised China for their contribution to the environment. “Despite its dirty coal plants,” wrote the Canadian equivalent of America’s Wall Street Journal, “[China] is the world's leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict.” The paper calls China’s solution a “simple” and “dramatic” fix that, if extended to other nations, would reduce global population by 50 percent by 2075.
 

From Politically Correct to Incorrect

 

Population control is not a mere eastern innovation but has an impressive pedigree among the sages of the West. In fact, up until the early 20th century, it was politically fashionable for liberals to talk about decreasing the surplus population. 20th century advocates of population control would often draw on the social theories of men like of Sir Francis Galton and Thomas Malthus who, a century earlier, had argued that the poor were draining the world’s recourses. (One of Malthus’s solutions was to reduce the surplus population by introducing policies specifically designed to bring death to large numbers of peasants. For example, he encouraged poor people to move near swamps, so that they would catch diseases and begin dying off.)

Throughout the 20th century, Malthusian ideas on population control were linked to theories of eugenics and social Darwinism. It was not until Hitler tried to move these ideas out of the anthropology class and into the gas chamber that population control stopped being a politically correct topic.

It wouldn’t take long for the sceptre of Hitler to wear off. Following the huge birth explosion that occurred in the mid to late 20th century, population control gradually returned to the national limelight. But this time, instead of being explicitly linked to theories like eugenics and social Darwinism, it was propelled by the emerging ideology of environmentalism.

While it was still not politically correct to appeal to social planners like Galton and Malthus, the basic concern that these men shared resurfaced, namely, that there will be a demographic Armageddon if human beings continue to expand while the resources on earth continue to be limited. Thus, it became politically correct to once again advocate population control.
 

Back to Being Politically Incorrect

 

As the 20th century wore on, however, something happened to change the tide once again. Like the notorious beech dwellers in Dr. Seuss’ story The Sneetches, who keep switching from wanting stars on their bellies to no stars, in the 80s liberals decided that it was no longer respectable to talk about population control.

The key factor this time was not that the world’s population had stopped growing, but that it stopped growing in the West. (Many factors contributed to this. It became the fashionable thing for women to marry late, while books like The Feminine Mystique helped to make women feel guilty if their greatest ambition was to be a wife and mother. This, together with the rise in abortion and homosexuality, meant that the birth rate in the West began to steadily decline.)

This fact alone would not have been sufficient to change the direction of the population debate, seeing that the international birth rate continued to increase. However, during the late 20th century the sceptre of racism loomed large in the background of almost every debate. You can be sure that it didn’t take long before people began realizing that if Western populations were decreasing while non-western populations were increasing, and if the former are primarily white while the later are primarily brown, then calling for a lower international birth rate is equivalent to calling for less brown babies.

Thus it was that population control became politically incorrect once again. Anthony Browne, policy Director for Economic Development for London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, lamented this shift in his book The Retreat of Reason:

Now that the population of the West has stopped growing, concern about overpopulation has become very unfashionable because, as Tony Benn put it, it means wanting fewer brown babies. The combination of Western guilt and fear of racism has all but killed off public concern about overpopulation in the last few decades.

And Back Again

 

Browne was writing in 2006, even as the wheels of one more paradigm shift began to slowly turn. Thanks to the increase hysteria about global warming, it recently became politically correct to again talk about decreasing the surplus population. As Garry Egger of the New South Wales Centre for Health Promotion and Research insists: “The debate (around population control) needs to be reopened as part of a second ecological revolution” The United Nations Population Fund has put the issue like this on their website:

Greenhouse gases would not be accumulating so hazardously had the number of earth's inhabitants not increased so rapidly, but remained at 300 million people, the world population of 1,000 years ago, compared with 6.8 billion today.

I first realized that there was a connection between global warming and a renewed interest in population control when I came across a report commissioned by the Optimum Population Trust in August 2009. Titled, ‘Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost,’ the report argued that the best way to combat global warming is to reduce the surplus population through contraception and abortion. The utilitarian logic of Malthus was simple: less people = less polluters.

It is not that the self-appointed environmental gurus are no longer concerned about things like CO2 emissions. Far from it. But many would like us to follow the guilty trail of carbon footprints back to their sources. Who uses all the fire extinguishers, compressed gases, refrigerators and heated swimming pools that continually pollute our environment? It’s not the polar bear.

Put bluntly, the earth has a surplus population of polluters and those polluters are the human population. (Of course, this conveniently ignors the fact that most CO2 emissions are not the result of man-made technology at all, but occur naturally through what the ocean releases and the consumption of vegetation by animals and microbes, but that is a different story.)
 

“Such People Exist”

 

To many, this is so obvious that only deniers “motivated by religious-right attitudes” could think otherwise. At least, that is what Morris Sullivan has argued in his article ‘Population Control: How Many Are Too Many?’ “In a world that currently wrestles with such serious problems as global warming” Sullivan writes, “it's hard to imagine anyone opposing restraints on population controls. However, such people exist.”

Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace was even more severe. Humans, he writes, are “a virus . . . killing our host the planet Earth” which is in desperate need of an “invasive” cure. How invasive? “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.”
 

From Global Warming to Sex Education

 

Even with the fate of planet earth supposedly hanging in the balance, Western nations are a long way off from advocating the forced abortion policies of China. Nevertheless, global warming is continually put forward as a reason for increasing the availability of contraception, abortion, sex education and family planning services. The National Wildlife Federation, for example, has published a Population and Global Warming Fact Sheet, calling for better “family planning and related health care and education.”

“Providing these services,” writes the NWF, “will not only reduce poverty and improve the lives of many, it will reduce the danger of climate change and other environmental stressors.”

Those who refuse to use contraception should be levied with a climate-change tax, argued Dr. Barry Walters. Dr. Walters proposal, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, suggests that the tax should apply for all couples having more than two children. The tax would involve an initial fine of $5,000 for each “extra” child with a $800 levy every year thereafter. However, parents can redeem themselves with carbon credits for contraceptives and sterilization procedures.
 

A New Redemption Story

 
Inverting the Christian redemption story, the new religion of science sees mankind as the curse while the scientists are the prophets pointing out the path of redemption. Like the Old Testament prophets, they know that salvation can never occur without a sacrifice. The sacrifice they are calling for is simple: we must become fewer and poorer. Only then will the world will be saved from the environmental Armageddon that is fast approaching as a result of reckless breeding.

That is the message that China brought to Copenhagen and it is the message that Bill Gates echoed in his recent comments.
 

Learning From the Polar Bear

 
While not wanting to grudge the polar bear his ice, Homo sapiens should at least be somewhat concerned. They should be concerned, not primarily because ice is melting, but because global warming – or at least the idea of it – is responsible for a renewed interest in population control. If history shows us anything, it is that when a civilization begins to feel guilty for existing, the results are not always pleasant. And it is at times like that when I begin to envy the polar bear. When he stands there proud and erect on his iceberg, he does not feel guilty for being alive.

He does not even feel guilty for procreating with Mrs. Polar Bear.
 

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