Did Microsoft founder Bill Gates tweet about forcing COVID-19 vaccinations on people by injecting mRNA into their food supply? No, that's not true: A search of Gates' Twitter account reveals the tweet is fake.
The claim appeared in an article published by NewsPunch on January 10, 2023, titled "Bill Gates Vows To Pump mRNA Into Food Supply To 'Force-Jab' the Unvaccinated" (archived here.) It displayed an undated tweet attributed to Gates that read:
Vaccines in our food supply solves the problem of vaccine hesitancy.
The NewsPunch article opened:
As the globalist elite continue finding it harder and harder to convince humanity to submit to Covid jabs and endless boosters, they are having to find cunning new ways to force their jabs on us. ...
Rather than admitting that humanity has woken up to the truth about the disastrous experimental Covid-19 jabs, Gates, who is not a doctor, is doubling down and taking it upon himself to vaccinate the world by stealth.
According to the billionaire eugenicist, farm animals including cows, pigs and chickens have inadequate genetics. And the only way to 'fix' those genetics is to 'vaccinate' every farm animal in the world with new mRNA vaccines.
Users on social media saw this title, description and thumbnail at the time of writing:
Bill Gates Vows To Pump mRNA Into Food Supply To 'Force-Jab' the Unvaccinated - News Punch
The tweet does not appear on Gates' Twitter feed, a search reveals. Internet archive The Wayback Machine crawled Gates' Twitter account more than 130 times between December 20, 2022 -- the last time Gates tweeted before NewsPunch published its claim -- and January 10, 2023, the date of publication. Lead Stories found no examples of the tweet in this timeframe.
An advanced Twitter search turns up no instances of the phrase "vaccines in our food supply solves the problem of vaccine hesitancy" on any account in the five years between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2022. The first time the phrase appears on the site is January 12, 2023, two days after NewsPunch published its story.
NewsPunch includes a video of Gates discussing the importance of vaccinating farm animals in developing countries, which was from January 26, 2018 -- almost two years before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. The clip appeared on the Twitter account of what was then called the British Department for International Development (DFID).
And Gates does not mention force-vaccinating humans via the food supply. Rather, he says:
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. It's making a big difference. I was down in Ethiopia seeing how chickens are out there, laying more eggs, getting more nutrition and even some small savings into the household. So, Edinburgh happens to be where a lot of the world's best work on this is done, and that's why DFID and the Gates Foundation are funding scientists here.
NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire) has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past. The Terms of Use of the site (archived here) also make it clear they don't really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:
NEWSPUNCH, LLC AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
Other Lead Stories debunks of NewsPunch stories are available here.
