A story claiming that the Indian government has closed the office of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is being widely circulated on social media. The claim is false as the foundation is still active and working in India.
Sobuhi Iqbal
A blogging website named steemit.com published a story in 2017 claiming that the Indian government has closed the office of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in India because of the “illegality of the testing of vaccines on poor children”.
The story has resurfaced back and is being circulated widely on WhatsApp and on twitter since August 30th, 2019. First a twitter account Fed Up Democrat (@DemocratFed) shared the story on its handle saying, “The Gates Foundation was brought under trial in the Supreme Court of India, and kicked out of the country for illegally using Indian children as guinea pigs.”
The handle has 1,319 followers and it was re-tweeted 214 times and 216 people liked it. Since August 31st till date, 11 individual twitter accounts have tweeted the fake story which dates back to 2017 via steemit.com.
The blogging website steemit.com has been operating since March 24, 2016. Steemit is a blockchain-based blogging and social media website based in New York City and it claims that it has 1,238,717 registered users. The website rewards its users with the crypto currency STEEM for publishing and curating content.
The story on steemit.com was written by Pranav Sinha, whose blog at Steemit has 142 followers. The story read, “yes, the Microsoft founder and the icon of the Third-World Humanitarianism have been kicked out of India as his fraud was called out. He came to India posing as a philanthropist and humanitarian helping the Third-World poor people by alleviating their conditions and yes, of course, “VACCINATING” their children,”
Prior to this blog, Pranav Sinha has written one shorter article on steemit.com targeting the Bill Gates foundation.
“The timeline [of the story]] is two years old,” said Archna Vyas, India’s Deputy Director Communications of the Gates Foundation. “It was misreported and baseless then and is doing rounds now again. There is no basis for this story.”
The Foundation has office in Delhi and its website says that it operates it as a branch office with permission of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and is appropriately registered under Indian law.
The foundation work started in India a decade ago with the purpose of developing a model HIV-prevention program. Since then, it has extensively worked in the field of child health, health and nutrition services and vaccines among other areas.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be awarded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation for the Swachh Bharat campaign when he visits the United States this month.
