Did a World Economic Forum report confirm that upwards of 6 billion people of Earth's 8 billion occupants will die in 2025, as online outlet The People's Voice said? No, that's not true: the only "report" cited by The People's Voice to support that statement is an old population-reduction prediction of a much smaller size by a website named Deagel.com that has made wrong predictions in the past. The evidence The People's Voice offers linking Deagel.com and the World Economic Forum is copied from a website that doesn't make that connection and which seems to be mostly based on someone named "Edwin A. Deagle Jr." having a last name that sounds similar to "Deagel.com" (but which is in fact spelled differently). Also, Lead Stories reached out to the World Economic Forum about the article and the organization's response included, "Claims linking the Forum to depopulation conspiracies are baseless and rooted in disinformation."
The claim originated in the headline and introduction of an article The People's Voice published on its website on August 22, 2024, titled, "WEF Document Confirms 6 Billion Humans Will Die In 2025" (archived here). It opened:
A World Economic Forum report hiding in plain sight confirms that upwards of six billion people will die in 2025 - and according to reports from Davos, Klaus Schwab has confirmed the stated goal is on target to be achieved.
The global elite have been warning us about their plans to radically depopulate the earth by any means necessary, and now the results are playing out before our eyes.
If we have any hope of stopping them from achieving their goal of murdering the vast majority of humanity and turning Earth into a prison planet to enslave the rest, the information in this report must be shared far and wide.
Below is how the article appeared at the time of this publication:
(Source: The People's Voice screenshot taken Fri Aug 23 19:05:02 2024 UTC
The People's Voice also published a video under the same title to the video-sharing platform Rumble (archived here) on August 23, 2024.
The report
The only report mentioned in the story is a link to a now deleted but archived page on a site named Deagel.com, titled "List of Countries Forecast 2025". The People's Voice described the site as an "obscure online entity." Deagel.com has made various predictions of dramatic population reductions but has shown nothing to back up those predictions (archived here).
For example:
- In 2010 it claimed the U.S. population would drop from 307 million in 2009 to 264 million in 2020.
- In 2011 it revised that prediction, now claiming it would drop from 314 million in 2010 to 248 million in 2020.
Data from the U.S. census put the actual number of people in the United States in 2020 at 329 million .
The Deagel.com page did not explain how any of the estimates were obtained. In the lengthy disclaimer at the bottom of the page there was no reference to any plan to "depopulate" or "murdering" people, instead it talked about economic collapse and migration as being the drivers for population change.
According to the Australian Associated Press data from Deagel.com has been used before in various false stories about vaccines, Covid-19 and depopulation.
The alleged link with the WEF
The People's Voice article claimed a man named "Dr. Edwin A. Deagel Jr." was behind the site:
Deagel was officially run by a shady figure known as Dr. Edwin A. Deagel Jr. He died in 2021, but as the clock counts down to 2025, understanding the truth about Deagel Jr has never been more important.
And it claims he was "linked" to several organizations, including the "World Economic Forum":
Recent findings link Deagel directly to significant players of the global elite: The Central Intelligence Agency, The Pentagon, The Rockefeller Foundation, and Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum.
It presented several documents and screenshots to support this assertion and spends several paragraphs talking about him. Most of the information appears to have been lifted verbatim from a 2023 article on Expose News (archived here) which doesn't mention the World Economic Forum at all and which doesn't provide a source or evidence for its claim that a man named "Deagle" ran Deagel.com.
The Expose News article, the documents and the screenshots all consistently say his last name is "Deagle" but The People's Voice writes it consistently as "Dr. Edwin A. Deagel Jr.", "Deagel Jr." and "Dr. Deagel".
Other than the similarity in name there appears to be nothing linking Deagle and Deagel.com: according to a Google search (archived here) the word "Deagle" doesn't appear on any of the pages of the site, and the disclaimer at the bottom of the page explicitly says:
We are not linked to any government in any way, shape or form.
So who is behind Deagel.com?
The website itself lists no publisher, but the domain name appears to have been registered in 2003 according to whois.com and it currently appears to be registered to an anonymous person from the Languedoc-Roussillon region in France. An archived whois.com record, an archived forum post from 2014 and information from a site that keeps track of website registrations (archived here) seem to indicate the site was registered by someone who gave their name or company as "Gas Deagel" with an address and phone number in Spain (and later an address and phone number just across the border in France).
The six billion number
Several of the charts and tables posted by The People's Voice to describe the Deagel.com data also appeared in the Expose News story we mentioned earlier. That article pointed to this website as its source (archived here) and it conveniently had the data from Deagel.com in a downloadable format. Lead Stories archived the Excel version here.
The file had a number of "7.226.458.211" as the world population in 2017 and said it would go down by about 354 million to "6.871.665.908" by 2025.
That is nowhere near the six billion decrease claimed by The People's Voice.
According to the World Bank in 2017 the actual world population was about 7.58 billion, already higher than what the Deagel.com data claimed.
The United Nations and other global organizations estimate Earth's human population is 8.2 billion (archived here) in 2024, contradicting The People's Voice statement that "the forecast was just not an estimation" but "a target that is on track to be hit."
No record of "regular meeting" held in Davos in August 2024
The People's Voice article also claimed that an unnamed "BBC journalist" was "summoned to Davos earlier this month," presumably in August 2024, for a "regular meeting." However, the article did not include the reporter's name or links to relevant reporting.
There is nothing on the WEF website about "regular" meetings being held in Davos, Switzerland. Instead, the organization holds an invitation-only annual meeting in Davos in January each year. In 2024, for example, the 54th annual meeting (archived here) was held between January 15 and 19 around the central theme of "Rebuilding Trust."
As of this writing, the most recently held meeting, the "Annual Meeting of the New Champions," was hosted June 25 to 27, 2024, in Dalian, People's Republic of China, according to the WEF event page (archived here). The next WEF event will be held in New York from September 23 to 27, 2024, with the title "Sustainable Development Impact Meetings" (archived here).
The response from WEF
The World Economic Forum responded to an inquiry from Lead Stories with an email on August 28, 2024, that consisted of three bullet points:
- The World Economic Forum does not support or advocate for depopulation.
- Claims linking the Forum to depopulation conspiracies are baseless and rooted in disinformation.
- Like many high-profile organizations or individuals, the Forum has seen a rise in conspiracy stories, both misinformation and disinformation. The Forum encourages grounded, fact-based debate as a core principle in our work, and we remain committed to our mission of improving the state of the world by fostering collaboration and dialogue.
The People's Voice
The People's Voice is among the most prolific online publishers of fake news. Articles on the site often link to and extensively quote stories from other sites to give an appearance of legitimacy but the main claim in the headline and/or the first paragraph of each article is almost never supported by the sources that are offered. The site routinely makes up quotes from people or misrepresents scientific study results.
It originally started as YourNewsWire in 2014 and rebranded as NewsPunch in 2017. In 2023, it rebranded itself again to The People's Voice. The People's Voice/NewsPunch/YourNewsWire has published numerous fake news articles in the past. Its Facebook page, "The People's Voice," lost its verification checkmark, according to a 2018 report from Media Matters For America.
Lead Stories contacted WEF for comment on the claims in The People's Voice story. If we receive a response, we will update this article.
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims involving WEF can be read here.
Lead Stories fact checks involving The People's Voice are here.
