A viral clip claims autism did not exist in Vietnam until Bill Gates brought vaccines to the country. The man making the claim is Dr Anthony Phan, a California-based doctor, who says autism cases in Vietnam have since risen by more than 300%.
The video resurfaced on Instagram on October 31, where the account mindsetofresistance shared it with the caption: “A doctor just put it plain: autism didn’t exist in Vietnam in 1975. Not until Bill Gates introduced the vaccination program.” The same clip was also shared widely on X earlier in October.
Fact-checkers, community notes and Vietnamese experts say the claim is false.
What Dr Anthony Phan Claimed
In the clip, Phan says Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his foundation introduced a vaccination program in Vietnam, and that autism cases followed.
“There’s no such thing as autism in 1975, year 2000, year 2001, there’s no such thing,” he says. “Now Vietnam has over a 300 percent rise in autism.”
The video is not new. It has circulated in English and Vietnamese on Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X since at least 2019.
The footage carries a watermark from the anti-vaccine documentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-up to Catastrophe,” which was directed by Andrew Wakefield. Wakefield lost his medical license after falsifying data in a 1998 paper that linked autism to the MMR vaccine. The Lancet later retracted that study.
What Others Say
Health experts in Vietnam have rejected the claim. “There is no link between vaccination and autism in Vietnam or other countries,” Quyet Minh Nguyen, a psychiatrist at the Vietnam National Children’s Hospital, told AFP.
Autism was only formally recognized in Vietnam in the late 1990s. That does not mean it did not exist before then. Diagnosing autism needs trained specialists and resources that were not widely available in the country at the time.
There are also no official nationwide statistics on autism rates in Vietnam that could back up the 300% figure. The first national survey, published by researchers at Hanoi University of Public Health in 2021, found that about 1 in 132 children had autism, a rate similar to other middle-income countries.
The Gates Foundation has also denied the claim. “We can confirm that these claims are false,” the foundation said.
What This Means for You
This matters a great deal in Pakistan. Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries where wild poliovirus is still spreading, and the WHO has extended travel restrictions on Pakistan over continued polio transmission. It said vaccine refusals remain a major obstacle to wiping out the disease.
Clips like this one, shared without context, can feed that hesitancy. So check whether health authorities back such claims.
Parents who notice signs of autism in their child should consult a pediatrician or developmental specialist. Support is also growing in Pakistan, with Sindh opening the country’s first residential autism center in Karachi this year.
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