Viral Influencer: How Bill Gates' Billions Shape US Medical Research

Authored by Paul D. Thacker via RealClearInvestigations,

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire's close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposes on his own fraught relationships with women.

On the eve of Gates' private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country's health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates' efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates's extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, "What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?"

Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH - the world's largest funder of biomedical research - gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meeting held on federal property.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.

Leveraging Investments

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation's mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation's assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac - this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Around that same period, the Gates Foundation announced that it had begun to "leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund" to advance the nonprofit's COVID work. The Gates Foundation also turned a $55 million investment in Pfizer's COVID vaccine partner, BioNTech, into over $550 million when it sold stock a couple of years later after the vaccine hit the market.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency's own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.

That firewall is not ironclad.

In 2018, for example, NIH officials, funded by beer and liquor companies through an FNIH grant, were in frequent contact with the alcohol industry while designing a study that seemed predetermined to find alcohol's benefits but not potential harms, such as cancer. The NIH also declined money in 2018 from drugmakers to support a proposed $400 million research program to discover opioid alternatives and addiction treatments. Like the alcohol funds, that drugmaker money would have also been routed through the FNIH.

Major Grants To Government

In 2003, the Gates Foundation donated $200 million to the FNIH to fund NIH scientific programs, an unprecedented sum. Rice University researchers warned in 2008 that this Gates cash was shifting the NIH's scientific priorities, even though the money was cycled through the FNIH. While FNIH manages and administers Gates money, they said, the Gates Foundation's scientific board ultimately "oversees and selects the projects to be funded" at the NIH.

After Gates gave an NIH lecture in 2013, NIH documents show that the agency began hosting Gates-NIH Workshops, eventually synchronizing federal research programs with Gates, to include coordinating grant funding and science policies across 10 NIH programs.

"Bill Gates, along with the NIH, the Wellcome Trust, it was this cartel," the whistleblower, a former NIH official who requested anonymity, told RCI. "This is a globalist movement. And that's something that I don't think the public knows."

The Gates Foundation held its second annual meeting with the NIH in July 2105, with both sides proposing new areas of teamwork, and later agreeing to cooperate on funding and research policies for global health. One area of overlap was the West African Ebola outbreaks. To align the Gates Foundation's Ebola research with the federal agency, Gates routed money through the FNIH so that NIH employees could hire the McKinsey consulting firm.

According to the NIH's summary of the 2015 workshop, McKinsey's study of the Ebola field found 20 therapeutics, eight diagnostics, and eight different vaccines, concluding that the Merck and GSK vaccines were the most advanced.

At no point in the several dozen emails and documents provided to RCI did NIH officials appear to raise any concerns about conflicts of interest regarding their work with Gates, nor the hiring of McKinsey to shape federal research and development policies. McKinsey is a global consulting firm whose clients include dozens of foreign governments and some of the world's largest corporations.

House Democrats released an April 2022 investigation that documented McKinsey's conflicts of interest during the opioid epidemic that killed tens of thousands of Americans, finding that McKinsey provided consulting advice to both Purdue Pharma and the Food and Drug Administration from 2008 to 2019.

In one example, the report surfaced emails with McKinsey employees congratulating themselves for influencing a 2018 speech on opioid safety by then-FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

When Congress brought McKinsey managing partner Bob Sternfels before cameras during a 2022 public hearing, he alleged that his firm did not have a conflict of interest when it gave simultaneous advice to both OxyContin's manufacturer and the government agency that regulated OxyContin. Two years later, McKinsey paid a $650 million fine to resolve a criminal and civil investigation into the firm's consulting work with Purdue Pharma.

"The NIH and BMGF have had a long history of interaction, particularly with respect to vaccines and drugs," reads the NIH summary of the 2015 Gates-NIH meeting.

A longtime NIH official said that the agency's leadership initially held Gates at arm's length, but eventually gave in. "They were very suspicious at first," said the official, who requested anonymity. "But they got caught up in, 'Wow, he's the richest man in the world!"

The NIH official added, "What I saw, which really, I think, extends until this day, is a complete merging of NIH and Gates. And I've never seen that written anywhere. I don't think people realize this incredible symbiotic relationship."

Bill Gates Is Coming!

Bill Gates added a bit of splendor to the Gates-NIH workshop series when he made his first personal appearance at the April 2016 meeting. As part of the meticulous planning for the event, NIH Director Francis Collins held a 45-minute teleconference 10 days prior to hash out the meeting's details with Trevor Mundel, a former pharmaceutical executive in charge of global health at the Gates Foundation.

According to a list of key "milestones and accomplishments" sent at the time to Collins, the Gates Foundation was by then firmly entwined within the NIH ecosystem to include dual workshops, joint clinical trials, combined research policies, and collaborative funding efforts. For example, NIH staff and Gates employees worked together on clinical trials for TB treatment in Africa. Both Gates and NIH employees also began a joint study for TB with support from the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.

The night before the meeting, the NIH held a reception and a catered dinner, paid by the FNIH, for almost two dozen Gates executives at the Cloisters Mansion, a historic, stone castle in rural Maryland, where actor Will Smith married actress Jada Pinkett.

Emails show that the NIH continued scrambling that night to lock down the arrival of other attendees, which included Obama officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Robert Califf.

To provide Bill Gates a luxury experience, NIH staff prepared Collins - a Nobel Prize-winning scientist - a minute-by-minute itinerary for the arrival of Gates and his retinue the following morning. NIH police were ordered to greet Bill at the facility's entrance and then escort the billionaire's three-vehicle convoy the final half mile to one of the main research centers, where the Director lingered in waiting. Such deference to power, said a senior Trump official when reading the Collins itinerary over the phone, is normally reserved for the president, first lady, or visiting dignitaries of state.

"Dr. Collins will meet Bill Gates after he exits the car and steps inside of the building," the itinerary read. After posing for a photo, Collins was bidden to escort the billionaire into the main auditorium and welcome the audience for Gates.

The agenda shows Collins and Gates Foundation's Trevor Mundel gave a joint introduction before stepping aside for Bill Gates's opening speech. Moderated by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who would later lead the U.S. medical response to COVID, the first panel included a mix of NIH and Gates executives discussing microbial outbreaks and public-private partnerships to develop pandemic-preventive vaccines.

Collins then moderated a panel on "Research on Engineered Gene Drives and Vector-Borne Disease Control: Status and Next Direction." Gene drive technology involves inserting specific genetic traits to spread rapidly throughout a population. Gates has long been a fan of gene drives to control mosquitoes, but the technology is highly controversial as it could also drive species to extinction and irrevocably alter ecosystems. The NIH's scientific program to control mosquitoes with genetic technology was apparently started with seed money from Gates in 2003. Last August, the African nation Burkina Faso suspended a malaria program funded by Gates over safety concerns.

Beginning in 2012, a Bill Gates-funded nonprofit called Target Malaria began a gene drive technology study to eradicate malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in Burkina Faso. Last August, Burkina Faso's government suspended Target Malaria's project over safety concerns and worries about the excessive influence of Bill Gates on the country's sovereignty.

Gates only stayed the morning of the 2016 meeting and left before lunch. "Bill Gates is escorted, by Dr. Collins, out of the building through the same hallway he entered," reads Collins' itinerary. "NIH Police escort Mr. Gates and staff to the exit gate."

The meeting ended with a wrap-up and review of next steps, led by Collins and a Gates executive.

Later that year, the FNIH honored the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Pfizer with an award for supporting the NIH's mission. Gates was recognized for $413 million dollars in donations and Pfizer for $73 million. In a press release announcing the honor, the NIH said, "Their gifts created cornerstone programs and paved the way for our partnerships with literally hundreds of other organizations dedicated to driving biomedical research worldwide."

The FNIH continues to maintain close ties to pharmaceutical interests, a major NIH funder. The current CEO, Julie Gerberding, came to the FNIH during the COVID pandemic, having previously served as President of Merck Vaccines.