CLAIM: A video clip shows that the original name of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control.
AP ASSESSMENT: False. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has had the same name since 2000 and grew out of the William H. Gates Foundation. In 1999, the foundation funded an institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health called the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. The clip shows a woman presenting a 2008 lecture given at Vassar College by Dr. Laurie Schwab Zabin, the institute’s founding director. The woman incorrectly refers to the institute as “the Institute for Population Control”, but the full video of the event shows Zabin later correcting her and reiterating that it is “the Institute for Population and Reproductive Health”.
THE FACTS: Social media users are sharing the 14-second clip of Vassar’s then-former chairman speaking badly, falsely claiming it’s proof that the foundation co-chaired by the Microsoft founder and his ex-wife was called formerly “The Institute for Population Control”. ”
“In 1998, Dr. Zabin became the founding director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control, with a mission to help developing countries create their own reproductive health policies and programs,” says the speaker in the short music video, which has over 238,000 views on Twitter.
“The original name of their ‘foundation’,” reads a Twitter post of the video with more than 8,000 retweets. Another post, which has been retweeted over 3,000 times, reads: “Before it was called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it was called something else.
Although the clip is a real sequence of the introduction of a conference of February 7, 2008, the full video on Vassar’s YouTube page shows that the alumni president was later corrected by Zabin in her lecture.
The original video features Zabin, who is a Vassar alumnus, talking about her career, including founding the institute and its mission.
At that point, around 38 minutes into the video, she notes, “And that’s not ‘Population Control’, that’s a bad word these days. It’s the bill & The Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and it’s based at the school and of course I stayed on as the founding director. But not anymore.”
A spokesperson for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation further confirmed that neither the foundation nor the institute was titled “Institute for Population Control”.
The Gates founded the William H. Gates Foundation in 1994, named after Gates’ father, according to the foundation website. Articles from the Associated Press and other media in the 1990s corroborate that this was the name used at the time. A Lexis search of the name found 700 mentions in press releases and articles between 1995 and 2000; “Gates Institute for Population Control” returned no results. In 2000, the William H. Gates Foundation merged with the Gates Learning Foundation to form the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 1999, the foundation awarded a $20 million grant to establish the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, according to the institute’s website. The institute focuses on research in family planning, reproductive health, and population dynamics.
Zabin, a professor at Johns Hopkins and a Senior expert in reproductive health, was director of the institute until 2002. She deceased from natural causes in 2020 at the age of 94.
Institute officials did not respond to requests for comment from the AP.
___
This is part of AP’s efforts to combat widely shared misinformation, including working with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.