The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have given away and pledged billions of dollars for a wide range of disease conditions ranging from malaria to neglected tropical diseases to vaccines. And this doesn’t include the monies for agricultural development and libraries, just to name a few of the many charitable projects they are involved in.

In a recent interview with CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Mr. Gates had a few choice words for Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his Lancet published-then-retracted autism-vaccine study, where he holds Wakefield and his fraudulent study responsible for the deaths of thousands of children:

“Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it’s an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn’t have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts — you know, they, they kill children. It’s a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.”

Gates is optimistic about the success of vaccine programs around the world citing what happened with smallpox and the great successes with polio.

Last year, the British medical journal, The Lancet, retracted the Wakefield study that suggested a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Last month the journal, BMJ, published the results of their investigation into the Wakefield study and called it an “elaborate fraud”.