Viral Video Falsely Links Bill Gates Vaccines to Autism in Vietnam

A viral video that claims autism did not exist in Vietnam until Bill Gates and his foundation introduced vaccination programmes has been circulating once again on social media, prompting fact-checkers and health experts to label the assertion false. The clip, attributed to California-based Dr Anthony Phan, asserts that autism cases in Vietnam have since risen by more than 300 percent — a figure that no official nationwide data supports.

The video resurfaced on Instagram on October 31 and had already been shared widely on X earlier in the month. It is not new: the footage has circulated in both English and Vietnamese across Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn and X since at least 2019. The clip carries a watermark from the anti-vaccine documentary "Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe," directed by Andrew Wakefield, the former physician who lost his medical licence after falsifying data in a 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism — a study later retracted by The Lancet.

Vietnamese health professionals have rejected the claim outright. Quyet Minh Nguyen, a psychiatrist at the Vietnam National Children's Hospital, told AFP that there is no link between vaccination and autism in Vietnam or in any other country. The Gates Foundation likewise said it could confirm that the claims are false.

Autism was formally recognised in Vietnam only in the late 1990s, but that reflects the arrival of trained specialists and diagnostic resources rather than the emergence of the condition itself. No official nationwide statistics exist to substantiate the 300 percent figure. The first national survey, published in 2021 by researchers at Hanoi University of Public Health, found that roughly 1 in 132 children had autism — a prevalence rate comparable to other middle-income countries.

The persistence of such claims carries direct consequences for Pakistan, which along with Afghanistan remains one of only two countries where wild poliovirus is still circulating. The World Health Organization has extended travel restrictions on Pakistan over continued transmission and has identified vaccine refusals as a major obstacle to eradicating the disease. Health authorities have long stressed that vaccine hesitancy fuelled by misinformation undermines immunisation drives and puts children at risk.

The resurfacing of the debunked clip underscores how recycled anti-vaccine content continues to spread across platforms years after its original release, even as public health officials warn that false claims about immunisation can set back disease elimination efforts in countries still battling preventable outbreaks.