Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is an American private foundation based in Seattle, Washington.

History

On January 12, 2016, Moderna announced that it had entered a funding agreement with the Gates Foundation to develop therapeutics against HIV and other diseases. The agreement included an initial $20 million grant, with the potential to increase the amount to $100 million.1) 2)

On September 4, 2019, BioNTech announced it had received a $55 million grant from the Gates Foundation to expand its HIV and tuberculosis portfolios.3)

COVID-19

In June 2020, the foundation contributed $750 million to the development of the AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID-19 vaccine.4)

Organization

Funding recipients

Grants

Recipients of grant funding from the foundation include:

Strategic Investment Fund

Companies in the foundation's SIF include:

Vaccines for Africa

Established as the African Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Partnerships (ACHAP) in 2000 as a public-private partnership (PPP) between the Government of Botswana, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and The Merck Foundation (TMF) Using a proposal-driven strategy ACHAP provided financial and technical support to the Government of Botswana, Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and the private sector.

Press Release: archive, CSR Wire, Gates Foundation,

From the press releases: This project is the first comprehensive initiative launched in the spirit of this UN/industry collaboration. Consistent with the set of guiding principles endorsed by all participants in the UN/industry collaboration, this project reflects a common vision of how the HIV/AIDS epidemic can be more effectively tackled in developing countries

Who Is Bill Gates A Documentary

James Corbett's four part documentary series, Who Is Bill Gates is the most comprehensive picture of the global health philanthropy as a mechanism for total control. It is meticulously documented and brilliantly organized and possible only with the vast talents, insights and Herculean research Corbett has devoted himself to without pause for years and years and years.

Pandemic Scenario Exercises

MARS 2017

May 2017, the G20 nations assembled in Berlin for the first time to participate in a Joint Exercise Scenario with an imagined China responding to a contagion dubbed MARS (Mountain Associated Respiratory Virus; also the Roman god of war). German government institutions collaborated with the Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the WHO, and the Robert Koch Institute.

Antibiotic Resistant Superbugs

Gates Foundation, UK Commit Nearly $52 Million to Fight Superbugs - May 23, 2018

The Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria Biopharmaceutical Accelerator (CARB-X), a nonprofit public-private partnership focused on accelerating efforts to address drug-resistant infections, has announced commitments totaling nearly $52 million over three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the government of the United Kingdom.

The commitments include up to $25 million from the Gates Foundation and up to £20 million (nearly $26.9 million) from the UK's Global Antimicrobial Resistance Innovation Fund (GAMRIF) in support of early-stage development of antibiotics, vaccines, and diagnostics designed to fight superbugs. According to CARB-X, drug-resistant infections are responsible for seven hundred thousand deaths worldwide each year.

Launched in 2016 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and based at the Boston University School of Law, CARB-X has over thirty-three projects in its portfolio and, with the latest commitments — announced at the launch of the Global Antimicrobial Resistance R&D Hub during the 71st World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva — has secured more than $500 million in funding. 7)

Pandemic Data

June 27, 2020 - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, together with other donors and partners of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, has announced a new alliance, the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA), aimed at accelerating clinical research on COVID-19 by enabling efficient data responses by making data available to heath researchers and scientists around the world. 8) 9)10)

Event 201

Funding

Affiliations

The Foundation is a member organization of the World Economic Forum, with whom it co-hosted Event 201 in 2019, with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.11) It is also a partner of the Chinese Vaccinology Course at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences alongside the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Research

Recipient Date Amount Notes
McMaster University January 13, 2022 Up to $3,000,000.00 USD To build “a stronger malaria mathematical modeling ecosystem in sub-Saharan Africa”.12)
McMaster University January 13, 2022 Up to $500,000.00 USD To increase the participation in “Digital Health Services for Pregnant Women to Support Antenatal Risk Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa”.13)
McMaster University January 13, 2022 Up to $200,000.00 USD In partnership with Kikundi to “identify areas for transformational innovation in service of national NTD [neglected tropical disease] programs” in Africa.14)
McMaster University January 13, 2022 Up to $200,000.00 USD Co-administered with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub to explore using “Metagenomic Next Generation Sequencing to Detect, Identify, and Characterize Pathogens”.15)
McMaster University January 19, 2021 Up to $100,000 USD per project Multiple projects to “fund studies that will facilitate research collaboration among researchers to address major COVID-19 research questions and reduce the harm of the current COVID-19 pandemic, while fostering global, multi-disciplinary collaborations.16)
McMaster University November 2019 $12,392,744.00 To identify and address ethical challenges, ethics-related risk, and policy gaps that have the potential to undermine the impact of potential life-saving technologies and interventions in global health and development research.17)
Pirbright Institute November 2019 $5,500,000.00 To establish a Livestock Antibody Hub aimed at improving animal and human health globally.18)
McMaster University October 2018 $1,993,992.00 To find new lead molecules against diseases that disproportionately affect the world's poorest populations.19)
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute November 2015 $1,417,613.00 To develop an algorithm based on blood values obtained from a heel prick to estimate the gestational age of a child at birth which can be used to guide assessments and therapy for that child.20) Resulting publication: T-cell receptor excision circle levels and safety of paediatric immunization: A population-based self-controlled case series analysis.21)
McMaster University June 2015 $6,616,077.00 To identify and address ethical challenges, ethics-related risk, and policy gaps that have the potential to undermine the impact of potential life-saving technologies and interventions in global health and development research.22)

Supra-national Organizations

Name Date Amount Notes
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) January 18, 2022 $150,000,000.00 “The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and London-based Wellcome have pledged an additional $150 million each to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to help end the COVID-19 pandemic and prevent future pandemics.”23)

The GAVI Alliance

Formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation GAVI is an international organisation that was created in 2000 to improve access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Gavi is the Vaccine Alliance, which brings together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to vaccines for children, wherever they live 24)

Jun 30, 2021 · At the 2020 Global Vaccine Summit, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced USD 1.6 billion for Gavi’s next 2021-2025 strategic period. In addition to this funding, the Foundation pledged USD 150 million in support of Gavi’s COVAX 25)

Gene Editing Technology

Media Funding

Gates Foundation Awards $20 Million to BBC World Service Trust

A five-year, $20 million grant awarded to the BBC World Service Trust by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in December blurs the lines between funding for traditional media and public education, the Seattle Times reports.

The grant will largely be used to support efforts to disseminate information about public-health initiatives in Bihar, one of the poorest and most underserved states in India.

The BBC World Service Trust, the international charitable arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation, works to promote human rights and reduce poverty through media and communications. It often works with the BBC World Service to get its message to the 180 million people around the globe who tune in to BBC World Service on a weekly basis and also provides technical support for news and media organizations in the developing world.

A recent Seattle Times analysis found that the Gates Foundation has spent nearly $70 million on direct grants to media organizations or for media training and research in an effort to boost and shape coverage of global health and development issues. However, the foundation told the Times that the BBC grant was different than grants it had awarded to news organizations like ABC and PBS.

“This grant does not support the news gathering capacity of the BBC,” said Gates Foundation spokesman Chris Williams in an e-mail to the Times. “This grant is essentially public education.” Sandi Doughton. “Gates Foundation Gives $20M to BBC Charity Arm.”27) Seattle Times 03/03/2011. 28)

YouTube Partnerships

Khan Academy

The gates foundation gave Khan Academy $300K. 29) Bill Gates was pivotal in ensuring the success of Khan Academy. 30)

Kurgsagt

Kurgsagt has been given $570,000 in a grant by the gates foundation. 31) According to an analysis, Kurgsagt consistently references gates-funded sources in their research. 32)

Crash Course

Crash course was started with backing from Bill Gates think tank “bcC3” 33)

Vsauce

A video entitled “The Future of Reasoning” was created to promote the book “How to avoid a Climate Disaster” 34)

Minute Earth

“Do you need to be rich to be healthy? (ft. Bill Gates)” was made in collaboration with Bill and Melinda as well as with financial support 35)

NGO Drug Networks

SEATTLE (October 19, 2021) - The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced today a commitment of up to $120 million to accelerate access to the investigational antiviral drug molnupiravir for lower-income countries as part of its COVID-19 response effort. The funding will be allocated based on consultations with partners, and will support the range of activities required to develop and manufacture generic versions of the drug, which is being developed by Merck & Co in collaboration with Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.

This commitment builds on the foundation’s ongoing efforts, including $1.9 billion in funding, since the start of the pandemic to increase access to COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests by supporting R&D, regulatory work, at-risk manufacturing, and product delivery…..

Since the start of the pandemic, the foundation has worked closely with a range of partners on R&D and delivery of COVID-19 tools. These partners include philanthropic and government donors that are part of the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator and global organizations in the therapeutics pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) partnership, including Unitaid, UNICEF, WHO, the Global Fund, Wellcome, and the Africa Medical Supplies Platform. The foundation will continue to work with multilateral organizations, nongovernmental organizations, governments, and other partners to ensure that clinical, regulatory, and delivery pathways are ready once molnupiravir and its generic versions become available. 36)

Gates Global Health Network

Bill Gates Pandemic Power & Profits

POLITICO September 14, 2022

Special Report - How Bill Gates and his partners took over the global Covid response By Erin Banco, Ashleigh Furlong and Lennart Pfahler

Four health organizations, working closely together, spent almost $10 billion on responding to Covid across the world. But they lacked the scrutiny of governments, and fell short of their own goals, a POLITICO and WELT investigation found.

While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan for the dissemination of those Covid tools to needy nations, though it would ultimately fail to live up to its original promises.

The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

POLITICO and WELT examined meeting minutes as well as thousands of pages of financial disclosures and tax documents, which revealed that the groups have spent nearly $10 billion since 2020 — the same amount as the leading U.S. agency charged with fighting Covid abroad. It is one of the first comprehensive accountings of expenditures by global health organizations on the global fight against the pandemic.

Jeremy Farrar, the Wellcome Trust director, struck a similar note. “Comprehensive pandemic preparedness and response requires the sort of funding and international cooperation that only governments can muster,” he said.

Farrar, however, defended the ACT-Accelerator (Act-A) partnership as “the best mechanism we have for delivering lifesaving Covid-19 tools across the world.”

“Before ACT-A was set up, there was no formal mechanism in place to coordinate and accelerate the development, production and equitable access to Covid-19 interventions globally,” he said. “While ACT-A may not be perfect … the global response would have been poorer and far more fragmented without it.”

The POLITICO and WELT investigation found, however, that ACT-A’s structure diminished accountability. ACT-A representatives set funding priorities and campaigned for donations. But the money — $23 billion in total — went directly to the entities involved in the initiative, such as Gavi and CEPI. Although ACT-A’s website keeps track of how much money was raised, it is nearly impossible to tell exactly where all of it went.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., leaders of the organizations were also in contact with senior U.S. health officials. Emails obtained by Republicans on Capitol Hill illustrate the extent to which Farrar, the director of Wellcome, was in touch with officials in some of the highest levels of the U.S. government on a sensitive health and national security issue.

The emails,37) released this year, show Farrar in the early weeks of the pandemic discussing the possibility of Covid having leaked from a lab in China with top U.S. health officials including Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.38)

What POLITICO Missed

POLITICO: How Bill Gates Took Over the Covid Pandemic Bill Gates took over Covid just like he took over Operating Systems by Igor Chudov - Sept 15, 2022

An amazing article from the least expected, mainstream source: The Politico.

The title of the article was apparently edited in a hurry post-publication because Google News still lists it as “How Bill Gates and his partners took over the global Covid response”. Here’s the archive link to the original article with “Bill Gates” in the title — proving it was later edited in a hurry. 39)

External links

1)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — Advancing an mRNA-based antibody combination to help prevent HIV infection. Moderna. Retrieved March 21, 2022, from http://archive.today/2021.08.23-023928/https://www.modernatx.com/ecosystem/strategic-collaborators/foundations-advancing-mrna-science-and-research
2)
Moderna Wins Initial $20M Grant from Gates Foundation. (2016, January 12). GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. https://archive.ph/xDOg7
3)
Boehler, M. (2019, September 4). BioNTech announces new collaboration to develop HIV and tuberculosis programs. BioNTech. http://archive.today/2022.01.03-191438/https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/biontech-announces-new-collaboration-develop-hiv-and
4)
Canellis, D. (2020, June 5). Bill Gates commits $750M to help Oxford vaccinate the world against COVID-19. TNW | Fintech-Ecommerce. http://archive.today/2023.02.25-123239/https://thenextweb.com/news/bill-gates-covid-coronavirus-vaccine-750-million-oxford-azd1222
5)
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation donations made to Janssen Vaccines & Prevention B.V. Vipul Naik. Retrieved March 29, 2023, from http://archive.today/2023.03.29-052407/https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donorDonee.php?donor=Bill+and+Melinda+Gates+Foundation&donee=Janssen+Vaccines+%26+Prevention+B.V.
11)
Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. (2019, October 14). Event 201 Facebook Event Announcement. Facebook. https://archive.org/details/event-201-facebook-event-announcement
12)
McMaster University. (2021, November 19). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Global Grand Challenges, Building Malaria Modeling Capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Research & Innovation. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/4FNbz
13)
McMaster University. (2021, November 19). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Global Grand Challenges, Digital Health Services for Pregnant Women to Support Antenatal Risk Stratification in Sub-Saharan Africa. Research & Innovation. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/O1R1a
14)
McMaster University. (2021, November 19). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Global Grand Challenges, Innovations in Eliminating Neglected Tropical Diseases. Research & Innovation. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/IDp9n/
15)
McMaster University. (2021, November 19). Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Global Grand Challenges, Metagenomic Next Generation Sequencing to Detect, Identify, and Characterize Pathogens. Research & Innovation. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/UBq5b
16)
McMaster University. (2021, January 8). Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Grand Challenges ICODA COVID-19 Data Science. Research & Innovation. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/2jvyV
17)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (2019, November). McMaster University. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/76GuD
18)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds development of Pirbright’s Livestock Antibody Hub supporting animal and human health. (2019, November 15). The Pirbright Institute. https://archive.ph/WbdNH
19)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (2018, October). McMaster University. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/fQJzp
20)
Ottawa Hospital Research Institute. (2015, November). Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://archive.ph/tHJ9f
21)
Wilson, K., Duque, D. R., Murphy, M. S. Q., Hawken, S., Pham-Huy, A., Kwong, J., Deeks, S. L., Potter, B. K., Crowcroft, N. S., Bulman, D. E., Chakraborty, P., & Little, J. (2018). T-cell receptor excision circle levels and safety of paediatric immunization: A population-based self-controlled case series analysis. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 14(6), 1378–1391. https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2018.1433971
22)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (2015, June). McMaster University. Retrieved December 1, 2021, from https://archive.ph/KfW2j
23)
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Pledge US$300 Million to CEPI for COVID-19 Pandemic Response and to Accelerate Epidemic Preparedness. (2022, January 18). Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. https://web.archive.org/web/20220206083311/https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2022/01/gates-foundation-wellcome-pledge-300-million-cepi-covid19-pandemic-response
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