Bill Gates speaks at the 2019 New York Times Dealbook.

(Mike Cohen / Getty Images)

ECONOMY CORONAVIRUS VACCINATION

While the Poor Get Sick, Bill

Gates Just Gets Richer
The billionaire’s pandemic investments, like much of his work,
remain a secret.
By Tim Schwab

OCTOBER 5, 2020
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 I n the early days of the pandemic, President Trump made
headlines when he reportedly tried to secure rights to a
vaccine from German developer CureVac on behalf of the US
government—a move that stirred questions about equity and
justice. Should the United States get priority access to the
Covid vaccine just because we are the world’s wealthiest
nation? Shouldn’t the most vulnerable—no matter their
nationality or salary—get vaccinated first?

“Capitalism has its limits,” one German lawmaker noted in a

widely reported tweet.

Had Trump succeeded, the deal might also have sent

another stark message about economic inequality
—delivering a financial windfall to one of the most moneyed
players in the pandemic response: the Gates Foundation.

The foundation recently reported a $40 million stake in

CureVac—one of dozens of investments the foundation
reports having in companies working on Covid vaccines,
therapeutics, diagnostics or manufacturing, according to The
Nation’s analysis of the foundation’s most recent tax return,
web site, and various SEC filings. The foundation has also
announced that it will “leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion
Strategic Investment Fund” to advance its work on Covid.

These investments, amounting to more than $250 million,

show that the world’s most visible charity, and one of the
world’s most influential voices in the pandemic response, is
in a position to potentially reap considerable financial gains
from the Covid-19 pandemic.

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 Recent SEC filings and the foundation’s website and most recent tax filings
show more than $250 million invested in dozens of companies working on
Covid vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and manufacturing. These
investments put the foundation in a position to potentially financially gain
from the pandemic.

Gates’s reported investment in CureVac, alone, may have

already delivered tens of millions of dollars in shareholder
value for the nonprofit Gates Foundation. Even though
Trump’s bid for CureVac failed, the company’s stock
skyrocketed 400 percent just two days after going public in
August.

Revelations of the Gates Foundation’s financial stake in

Covid-19, which Bill Gates does not appear to have publicly
disclosed in dozens of recent media appearances, speak to
broader criticisms about the lack of transparency in the
foundation’s increasingly central role in the pandemic.

“Who are they accountable to? They don’t even have a

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 governance structure that’s clear,” notes Kate Elder, senior
vaccines policy adviser to Doctors Without Borders.
“Increasingly, I see less information coming from the Gates
Foundation. They don’t answer most of our questions. They
don’t make their technical staff available for discussions with
us when we’re trying to learn more about their technical
strategy [on Covid] and how they’re prioritizing certain
things.”

And Gates’s priorities in developing and distributing a Covid

vaccine, Elder says, are increasingly the world’s priorities, as
multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization
have ceded leadership to a group of public-private
partnerships where Gates provides key funding. These
organizations, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, are working with
the WHO to develop “the largest and most diverse Covid-19
vaccine portfolio in the world,” which they hope can deliver
billions of vaccine doses in the year ahead, including to
many poor countries.

James Love, director of the NGO Knowledge Ecology

International, says the foundation’s decades of work on
vaccines, along with its sprawling financial ties, allowed it to
assert influence early in the pandemic.

“He had enough money and enough presence in the area for
a long enough period of time to be positioned as the first
mover and the most influential mover. So people just relied
upon his people and his institutions,” says Love, “In a
pandemic, when there is a vacuum of leadership, people that
move fast and seem to know what they’re doing, they just
acquire a lot of power. And he did that in this case.”

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 Gates’s leadership in the pandemic has been widely, almost
universally, praised, with The New York Times calling him a
“vocal counterweight to President Trump,” and Madonna
making a million-dollar donation to support the foundation’s
work. But because Gates is not an elected representative or
public official, the details of his far-reaching influence—and
finances—have largely eluded public scrutiny.

“You have an enormous amount of power that affects

everyone around the globe, and there should be some
accountability, some transparency,” says Love. “People are
not asking unreasonable things. It’s a charity.… [We’re
asking], ‘Can you explain what you’re doing, for example?
Can you show us what these contracts look like?’ Particularly
since they’re using their money to influence policies that
involve our money.”

The Gates Foundation declined requests for interviews and

did not respond to detailed questions sent by e-mail,
including about its investments in pharmaceutical
companies working on Covid.

Love and other critics say a key role Gates has played in the
pandemic has been elevating the pharmaceutical industry—
for example, pushing the University of Oxford to deliver its
leading Covid-19 vaccine platform into the hands of Big
Pharma. The resulting partnership with AstraZeneca had
another effect, as Bloomberg and Kaiser Health News recently
reported, changing the university’s distribution model from
an open-license platform, designed to make its vaccine freely
available for any manufacturer, to an exclusive license
controlled by AstraZeneca.

Gates had the leverage to push the university, Bloomberg

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 reports, because the foundation is one of the founders and
largest funders of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations, which in turn funds the University of Oxford’s
vaccine development (to the tune of some $384 million). The
Gates Foundation has also directly given hundreds of
millions of dollars to the university through charitable grants
for a variety of projects—including previous funding to the
university’s Jenner Institute, which is developing Oxford’s
Covid vaccine.

Oxford and AstraZeneca have made public promises about

forgoing profits and providing equitable access to their
vaccine, if it is successful, but neither organization would
provide details or documentation about this plan. Other
companies have made similar humanitarian pledges even as
they have pursued a traditional business model—based on
exclusive licenses—that critics say is designed to generate
profits, not promote equitable access.

Jörg Schaaber, executive director of the German advocacy

group BUKO Pharma-Kampagne, sees the Gates Foundation
as having an ideological investment in this business model,
pointing to many of the foundation’s senior staff who come
from the pharmaceutical industry, including the president of
Gates’s global health program. Other critics note how the
Gates Foundation’s endowment could benefit from the
foundation pushing Covid vaccine development toward
exclusive licenses.

“If we change the way in which you regulate the industry, or

the ways in which you want medicines or vaccines to be
produced and delivered,” says K.M. Gopakumar, legal adviser
to the Third World Network, who is based in India, “it’s

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 definitely going to affect these companies’ business model—
and also the investments of Gates Foundation. So they are
using their money to reinforce the status quo.”

Gates himself describes his foundation as intimately involved

in the partnership between AstraZeneca and the University
of Oxford.

“Every week we’re talking with AstraZeneca about, okay,

what’s going on in India, what’s going on in China, and so
that we can get, assuming that the Phase Two data and
eventually the Phase Three data is promising, that we’re
ready to go with that,” Gates noted in a press briefing in
June—one of many interactions with the media where he
seems to describe his foundation as, essentially, leading the
global pandemic response.

“Our foundation has a lot of vaccine expertise and deep

relationships with the manufacturers, and so, we’ve taken
our staff and now are looking at each of these [potential
vaccine] constructs and the data and making sure that for
the ones that are the most promising, there is a plan to have
multiple factories in Asia, multiple factories in the Americas,
multiple factories in Europe…. We understand which of these
vaccines we can scale up the production, and I’m hopeful
that it will be at that large number, because the cooperation
from the pharma companies, of saying, ‘yes, you can use my
factory to make someone else’s vaccine,’ we’re getting a very
good response to that, and that’s really unprecedented.”

During Gates’s remarks, he made no mention of his

foundation’s investment in any pharmaceutical companies
working on Covid. Similarly, in an August interview with
Wired, the former head of Microsoft said that if he were
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 infected with Covid, he would want to be prescribed the
therapeutic drug Remdesivir—failing to mention his
foundation’s stock position in the drug’s owner, Gilead,
according to the charity’s most recent tax return, from 2018.
(The foundation refused to provide details about its current
investment portfolio.)

Journalistic norms require disclosure of conflicts of interest.

So do the prevailing rules in science, but even when Gates
enters the scientific discourse—for example in the
commentary he penned in the New England Journal of
Medicine, prescribing what he thought government leaders
should be doing to tackle Covid—he does not disclose the
details of his financial ties. Gates filled out the journal’s
required conflict-of-interest form, but simply listed his
conflicts as “numerous”—giving readers no sense of the size,
scope, or type of his financial stake in the pandemic.

Lisa Bero, professor of medicine and public health at the

University of Colorado, says authors have to provide details
of their financial conflicts of interest, even if it means listing
dozens of companies—which is not unheard of among
authors in the New England Journal of Medicine. The journal
did not respond to multiple inquiries about Gates’s
disclosure.

Sheldon Krimsky, a professor of humanities and social

sciences at Tufts University (with whom I co-authored an
academic journal article in 2017), says disclosures are critical
because they notify readers about potential bias.

“The last person I would want to tell me if a vaccine was

ready to go is a person who has an investment in the
vaccine,” Krimsky said.
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 Gates didn’t mention specific vaccines in his journal article,
but elsewhere he seems to be picking winners and losers. In
a longform interview on The Daily Show in April, Bill Gates
seemed to say his foundation would spend billions of dollars
to support manufacturing for seven of its favored vaccine
constructs. (The foundation would not confirm this spending
or provide any details).

If Gates followed disclosure rules, we would have

transparency not just around the Gates Foundation’s $47
billion endowment but also about where Bill and Melinda
Gates’s personal fortune is held.

According to Forbes’s estimates, Bill Gates’s private wealth,

estimated at around $115 billion, has increased by more than
$10 billion during the pandemic. It is unknown if the Gateses
have personal investments in companies working on Covid.

As millions of Americans applied for unemployment benefits in recent

months, Town and Country reported that Bill and Melinda Gates purchased
a $43 million mansion. According to Forbes, the Gateses have seen their net
worth increase by more than $10 billion during Covid. (Photo: Zillow)

In the same way that policy-makers and journalists have

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 called on Trump to release his tax forms, in part to
understand if he may be financially benefiting from his
presidency, Bill Gates’s tax records and investment portfolio
bear scrutiny because of his leadership role in the pandemic
—whose total cost to the global economy is in the trillions of
dollars.

The Nation’s analysis of Gates’s finances was in part based on

the foundation’s most recent IRS tax return—from 2018. As it
stands, we won’t be able to see all of Gates’s current
investments until late in 2021, when the foundation releases
its 2020 tax forms. The Nation made multiple requests for up-
to-date financial disclosures and tax forms from the
foundation and the Gates’s family but got no response.

Public understanding of Gates’s finances is also limited by

the foundation’s maze of inscrutable investments, like its
reported $100 million stake in GTI 8 Institutional
Investors—a private fund domiciled in the Cayman Islands, a
jurisdiction renowned for its financial secrecy. The company
in charge of the fund, Global Forest Partners, said the fund’s
specific holdings are not publicly disclosed.

While the Gates Foundation is a nonprofit organization, its

endowment still generates billions of dollars in income—
more money over the last five years than the foundation has
given away in charitable grants.

If the pandemic does end up delivering a financial windfall

to Bill Gates or his foundation, it may pale in comparison to
the political boost he’s received as Earth’s de facto vaccine
czar. His widely lauded role in the pandemic already appears
to have helped institutionalize and normalize his political
power in other areas where the foundation works. Earlier
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 this year, over chorus of praise for Gates’s leadership on
Covid, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he
will lean on the Gates Foundation to help him “reimagine”
the state’s education policy.

Tim Schwab Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C.,

whose investigation into the Gates Foundation was part of a 2019 Alicia
Patterson Foundation fellowship.

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COMMENTS (13)

IMMIGRATION POLICY BUDGETS CALIFORNIA

Tragedy and Hope on the

Western Front
The imprisonment of Iraqi refugee Omar Ameen and the prospect
of humane redistribution of wealth show California both failing
and aspiring to its political promise.
By Sasha Abramsky

TODAY 5:00 AM

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 A woman carrying a child is escorted by authorities to an apartment
following the arrest of a 45-year-old Iraqi refugee, Omar Ameen in
Sacramento, Calif., August 15, 2018. (Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo)

T his

week,
two
stories
out of

California grabbed my attention.

The first is a federal story. It is about a refugee, Omar

Ameen, who has been in the United States since 2014. He
was arrested in the summer of 2018, in Sacramento, where
he and his family were living, and accused of being a senior
figure in ISIS. The particular allegations, leveled by a
mentally ill teenager and a man whose family has a vendetta
against Ameen’s family, accused him of him having murdered
a police officer in Iraq. That Ameen was a refugee made him

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 a poster child for Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the
Justice Department and Trump himself, who at one point
claimed that 300 refugees in the United States had open
terrorism investigations against them, made as much hay as
they could out of the allegations.

In court, however, where government lawyers argued for his

extradition to Iraq—a country in which he would likely be
tortured and then executed, his lawyers feared—the
allegations fell apart. It turned out that, at the time he was
supposed to have killed the policeman in Iraq, he was
actually in Turkey. His cell phone records backed this up.

On April 21 of this year, two and a half years after Ameen was
taken into custody, Judge Edmund Brennan, a US magistrate
in Sacramento, dismissed the government’s effort to comply
with Iraq’s extradition request for Ameen. The court ordered
that he be immediately freed from the Sacramento jail,
where he has resided for the past several years.

That should have been that. Except it wasn’t.

Instead of being released, Ameen was transferred to an ICE

holding facility. Now, despite the protests of Sacramento
Mayor Darrell Steinberg and several City Council members,
the agency is moving forward with plans to deport, rather
than extradite, Ameen to Iraq. He is charged with allegedly
having lied about his father’s cause of death on the
paperwork he filled in when applying for refugee status
nearly a decade ago. His lawyers in the federal public
defenders’ office have set up a website on his behalf, hoping
to channel public unease at ICE’s actions into a lobbying
effort to get local members of Congress to pressure the
agency to reconsider their efforts.
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 From start to finish, there’s something entirely dystopian
about Ameen’s case, from the reliance on non-credible
informants to the behavior of ICE in the face of a court
ruling urging the refugee’s release. It’s as dystopian as, to
take another topic du jour, the GOP removing Liz Cheney
from her leadership position this week because she had the
guts to stand up against Trump’s ongoing assault on the
democratic and constitutional process. Read about ICE long
enough—or for that matter, the latest GOP shenanigans—and
you’ll end up craving any sign that government agencies,
can, and indeed sometimes do, behave in ways to benefit
rather than harm ordinary people.

W hich brings me to the second California story this week,

this one far more optimistic in timbre. A little more
than a decade ago, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis,
California had a budget deficit running to tens of billions of
dollars, and was widely written off as having an entirely
dysfunctional tax code and a budgetary process that
promised too much to too many without ever finding the
means to cover these obligations. Since then, the state has
seen a remarkable fiscal turnaround. Now, in 2021, Governor
Newsom, fighting for his career in the face of a recall
campaign, is in the extraordinarily fortunate—and
historically unprecedented—situation of having roughly
more than $76 billion (some from California’s much higher
than expected tax revenue this past year, the rest from
federal legislation to counter the impact of the Covid
pandemic) to allocate.

The ways that vast amount of money will be spent, centered

around what the governor terms the “California Comeback
Plan,” could well reinvent California’s social compact over

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 the coming years.

Newsom is proposing additional $600 stimulus checks to

most California taxpayers, as well as top-up $500 payments
per child to families with children. He is planning to allocate
a staggering $12 billion to efforts to finally get a handle on
California’s spiraling homelessness crisis. Seven billion
dollars of this will be used to convert old buildings into
shelters or long-term affordable housing units.

The governor’s budget proposes spending close to $10 billion

to cover pandemic-related unpaid rent and utility bills for
low-income residents. Separate from the Comeback Plan, the
governor has already signed into law legislation freeing up
hundreds of millions of dollars in investments to tackle the
growing threat of megafires in the parched West.

California hasn’t always lived up to its political promise. In

this strange moment, however, the Golden State’s coffers are
fuller than they have ever been before—in large part because
of the fact that America’s super-wealthy, a disproportionate
number of whom live in the state, have done super-well
financially during the pandemic, meaning they ended up
paying a lot more in taxes that was anticipated early in the
crisis. That leaves progressives a window of opportunity to
push for ambitious, transformational, changes.

If this past week is any indication, Newsom, looking to shore

up his support in the months leading up to the recall vote,
doesn’t intend to let the opportunity slide.

Sasha Abramsky Sasha Abramsky, who writes regularly for The Nation, is
the author of several books, including Inside Obama’s Brain, The American Way
of Poverty, The House of 20,000 Books, Jumping at Shadows, and, most recently,
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 Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World’s First Female Sports
Superstar. Subscribe to The Abramsky Report, a weekly, subscription-based
political column, here.

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COMMENTS (0)

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