Fact Check: No, India is Not Suing Bill Gates for Wrongful Polio Vaccination Deaths

For the past few days, a post has been going viral on social media which claims that India is planning to sue Bill Gates for the wrongfully paralysing young children while his foundation carried out testing for polio vaccines in the country. The post is fake.

On April 4, a Facebook user named Martha Henderson Huckabay posted a photo of Gates and physician Anthony Fauci, who is the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The post reads, "India is suing Bill Gates because he vaccinated 77,000 third world girls between the ages of 9 & 15 with the HPV vaccine and many of them died. Bill Gates is a globalist who funded the Coronavirus vaccine and owns the Wuhan lab in China. Soros is his partner."

Martha also urges people to steer clear of the coronavirus vaccine that the Gates' Foundation is trying to develop and says that she and her family will never go for the vaccine.

Interestingly, a quick glance at Martha's Facebook profile will also show that she has been actively protesting against lockdown and believes that states should be reopened, even as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc in countries around the world.

Similar messages have gone viral on Twitter as well:

Firstly, the photo being shared on Facebook and Twitter dates back to December 2018 and can be found on the blog of the NIH, here. Dr. Francis Collins of the NIH posted the photo and captioned it, "The NIH teamed with the Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation to hold their fifth annual consultative workshop on global health. The workshop took place on December 11, 2018 in Bethesda, MD. Some of the topics discussed were a universal flu vaccine, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and maternal, neonatal and child health. Here, I am heading to the workshop with Bill Gates (left) and Tony Fauci (far left), director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases."

A few days ago, viral messages claimed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had "paralyzed 496,000 children" in India while testing for a new polio vaccination between 2000 and 2017.

However, a fact check by News18 debunked the claim here.

A scan of Indian media reports from 2002 to 2017 also showed no such records of children getting paralysis due to vaccine testing.

We also accessed a report by the Indian Council of Medical Research which mentions the final findings of the HPV Vaccine: Evidence for Impact project. This is the same project which tested polio vaccines in India and other third world countries, and was funded by the Gates' Foundation. It is because of this project that Gates has been accused of "killing" young girls in India.

The report clearly mentions that the study was conducted on 25-30000 girls in India out of which seven deaths were reported. However, none of the deaths were related to the vaccine because the girls did not have a preceding illness prior to their death and there had been no complications.

One girl died of poisoning, one drowned and the other died of malaria.

All of this had been mentioned in an FIR that had been filed and had been revealed in the girls' autopsies.

This automatically debunks the absurd claim that India was suing Bill Gates for the deaths of these children. There are no reports or government notifications to show that India was planning to take action against Bill Gates for the same.

In short, do not believe everything you read on social media.