A video shared on Facebook claims Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates said that 3 billion people need to die.

Verdict: False

There is no record of Gates saying he wants to eliminate 3 billion people. The claim appears to stem from a misrepresentation of comments Gates made in a 2010 Ted Talk about climate change.

Fact Check:

The Facebook post shares a video of a man who says that Gates said 3 billion people, starting in Africa, need to die. The video shows Dr. Robert O. Young, who, according to NBC San Diego, was sentenced to jail time for practicing medicine without a license, as he speaks in front of a panel for the International Tribunal for Natural Justice, a group that has promoted conspiracy theories, specifically about 5G technology, the Daily Mail reported.

“There’s too many people on the planet we need to get rid of,” Young says. “In the words of Bill Gates, at least 3 billion people need to die. So we’ll just start off in Africa, we’ll start doing our research there and we’ll eliminate more of the Africans because they’re deplorable, they’re worthless, they’re not part of this world economy.” (RELATED: Have Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, The WHO And Others Been Charged With War Crimes?)

There is, however, no record of Gates saying he wants to eliminate 3 billion people. Check Your Fact searched through the Gates Foundation website and Gates’ blog, but found no evidence of him making the statement attributed to him in the video. Nor did a search of Gates’ verified social media accounts turn up any similar remarks.

Check Your Fact also didn’t find any media reports corroborating the claim that Gates made the comment, only other fact-checkers debunking the claim. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did not respond to Check Your Fact’s request for comment by the time of publication, but a spokesperson for the foundation told PolitiFact that the claim was false.

The claim that Gates said 3 billion people need to die appears to be a misrepresentation of comments Gates made during a 2010 TED Talk about how to mitigate the effects of climate change. A review of the transcript of his speech shows that he did not claim 3 billion people need to die.

Instead, Gates stated that increasing access to health care, reproductive health services and vaccines would lower the rate of global population growth and help lower carbon emissions. “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about 9 billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we lower that by perhaps 10 or 15%,” Gates said.

In addition, Gates said in 2012 that reducing child mortality rates may help slow unsustainable population growth rates, saying, “Amazingly, as children survive, parents feel like they’ll have enough kids to support them in their old age, so they choose to have less children.” He and his wife Melinda also wrote in their 2014 annual Gates Foundation letter that there is a correlation between “child death and birth rates,” noting that “when children survive in greater numbers, parents decide to have smaller families.”

“When children are well-nourished, fully vaccinated, and treated for common illnesses like diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia, the future gets a lot more predictable,” the letter reads in part. “Parents start making decisions based on the reasonable expectation that their children will live.”

In the letter, he and his wife state, “We make the future sustainable when we invest in the poor, not when we insist on their suffering.” At no point in the annual letter do they advocate for 3 billion deaths.