Gates Foundation wasn’t named the Institute for Population Control
CLAIM: A video clip shows the original name of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population Control.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has had the same name since 2000, and grew out of the William H. Gates Foundation. The foundation in 1999 funded an institute at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health called the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health. The clip shows a woman introducing a 2008 lecture at Vassar College by Dr. Laurie Schwab Zabin, the institute’s founding director. The woman mistakenly refers to the institute as the “Institute for Population Control,” but full video from the event shows that Zabin later corrects her and reiterates 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-alumni president misspeaking, falsely claiming it is evidence that the foundation co-chaired by the Microsoft founder and his ex-wife was once named 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 video clip, which has more than 238,000 views on Twitter.
“The original name of their ‘foundation,’” reads one Twitter post of the video with more than 8,000 retweets. Another post, which was retweeted more than 3,000 times, says: “Before it was called the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation it was called something else.”
While the clip is real footage of the introduction to a lecture on Feb. 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 shows Zabin, who is a Vassar alum, speaking about her career, including the founding of the institute and its mission.
At that point, around the 38-minute mark of the video, she notes: “And it is not ‘Population Control,’ that’s a naughty word these days. It’s the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and it’s based in the school and of course, I stayed on as its founding director. But not anymore.”
A spokesperson for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation further confirmed neither the foundation nor the institute were titled the “Institute for Population Control.”
The Gateses founded the William H. Gates Foundation in 1994, named for Gates’ father, according to the foundation’s website. Articles from The Associated Press and other news outlets in the 1990s corroborate that this was the name used at the time. A Lexis search for the name found 700 mentions in press releases and articles between 1995 and 2000; “Gates Institute for Population Control” returned zero results. In 2000, the William H. Gates Foundation was merged with the Gates Learning Foundation to form the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 1999, the foundation gave 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 John Hopkins and a leading expert in reproductive health, was the institute’s director until 2002. She passed away of natural causes in 2020 at the age of 94.