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One of the world’s richest men, who spoke in 2010 about how vaccines (which he heavily pushes throughout the world) are helping to cull the world’s population, is now predicting that as many as 33 million people could soon die from a modern-day pandemic similar to the 1918-1919 Spanish flu.

Excuse me, how does a public health measure that saves millions of lives per year "help to cull the world's population"?

Of course for many in the scientific community, a major pandemic like that would be a perfect solution to the “overpopulation problem” that they believe the world is facing.

Most of us in the scientific community become members because we want to better the human condition, not because we want to kill people off.

There is a strong correlation between better health and number of children that people have, and in this case, correlation does mean causation (because there is a mechanism by which the one causes the other). When children are extremely likely to survive until adulthood, people have fewer children and devote their resources to those children. When children are unlikely to survive to adulthood, people devote their resources into having more children to increase the chance of having at lease one survive. Thus, we decrease overpopulation by making people healthier so they live longer.

A pandemic is probably of more concern to public health scientists than anyone else. While the public periodically gets all worked up about some outbreak, and then forget it a few months later when it turns out that some frivolous thing like the Kardashians is more interesting, there are scientists who spend their entire careers studying potentially pandemic diseases and trying to develop better ways to counter them.