In June, a whistle-blower revealed that the US National Institutes of Health (“NIH”), the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, has completely merged with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (renamed ‘The Gates Foundation’).
This isn’t a recent development; it became apparent to the NIH whistle-blower more than 10 years ago.
Gates was able to take control of the NIH by funding the agency’s own non-profit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health.
By Paul Thacker,
On the eve of Gates’ private testimony with Congress scheduled for [9 June 2026], a trove of federal whistle-blower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations(“RCI”) 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 programmes.
The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistle-blower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates’s extensive influence over US 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 US 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 meetings held on federal property.
The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.
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 non-profit 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 non-profit’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 non-profit, 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 programme to discover opioid alternatives and addiction treatments. Like the alcohol funds, that drugmaker money would have also been routed through the FNIH.
In 2003, the Gates Foundation donated $200 million to the FNIH to fund NIH scientific programmes, 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 synchronising federal research programmes with Gates, to include coordinating grant funding and science policies across 10 NIH programmes.
“Bill Gates, along with the NIH, the Wellcome Trust, it was this cartel,” the whistle-blower, 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.
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 (“FDA”) 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 [Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation] 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 realise this incredible symbiotic relationship.”
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