Was Bill Gates Cornered by ABC News on Questions Related to COVID-19 Vaccine?

We found the video was digitally altered. The questions in the viral clip were not part of the original interview.

Fact-Check: This video of Bill Gates is digitally-altered. 

(Photo: The Quint)

A video interview of the co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has gone viral on the internet where the interviewer can be heard asking him questions about his credentials and accusing him of causing people to suffer by promoting COVID-19 vaccines.

The claim: Those sharing the video have claimed that Gates was cornered by the "tough" questions on the COVID-19 vaccine. The video ends with Gates ending the interview abruptly because of the line of questioning.

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Source: Twitter/Screenshot)

(The same posts were also shared on Facebook.)

What is in the viral video:

• In the viral video, the anchor asks Gates about his contributions to the world while claiming he “stole the idea of Microsoft Windows from the creator of MS-DOS, Gary Kildahl, for a couple of dollars”.

• The anchor then goes on to ask questions about the COVID-19 vaccine and claims that the “vaccines have countless caused side effects and deaths”, to which Gates say, “That’s a very immature way of looking at it”, while seemingly agreeing with her assessment. 

The truth: We found that the video was edited to make the misleading claim. The original interview was uploaded on the YouTube channel of ABC News (Australia) but the questions in the viral video were not a part of it.

How did we find that out: We used the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension to extract keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search on some of the keyframes.

• We found that the video was from an interview of Gates with Australian journalist Sarah Ferguson published on ABC News (Australia) on 31 January.

• We went through the complete interview on YouTube and the viral video was not a part of the interview.

• On the contrary, Gates had addressed a question on the conspiracy theories around COVID-19 vaccine and mentioned that he had complained to the tech companies like Meta, Twitter and Google, whose platforms were being used to peddle disinformation about him.

• He answered questions about his philanthropy, ties to the late Jeffery Epstein and his views on climate change.

Article on the interview by the anchor: Ferguson wrote all about her interview Gates in an article co-authored with Myles Wearring on ABC News (Australia)'s website.

• The article did not mention any of the questions shown in the viral video.

Conclusion: An edited video of an interview of Bill Gates has gone viral to make misleading claims about him.

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