IN 2010, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced an international collaboration it called the Decade of the Vaccine, the aim of which was to create a Global Vaccine Action Plan.
As Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) adviser and GreenMed founder Sayer Ji has uncovered in the Epstein files, during 2011, JP Morgan executives were working with Jeffrey Epstein to direct how the BMGF would create the institutional structures to profit from pandemics and vaccines. Epstein was in turn curating links between the US Defence Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and the Gates Foundation. As Ji writes, ‘Preparedness is a public good. Pre-alignment of profit, power, and narrative control around a predicted crisis category is not.’
DARPA sponsored research into mRNA vaccines began in 2013 with the launch of DARPA’s ADEPT project to develop so-called ‘rapid response’ vaccines. They are perhaps the most significant legacy of the Decade of the Vaccine. In 2015, a DARPA manager working with Epstein to develop a project proposal acknowledged that each technology could ‘translate into weapons’.
As Ji found in the Epstein files, DARPA was a key player in the pandemic preparedness enterprise Epstein was directing the Foundation to create. The ADEPT project, which was overseen by Colonel Dan Wattendorf between 2011 and 2016, directed research funding to Moderna and another German mRNA-focused company, Curevac. ADEPT transitioned into DARPA’s P3 Pandemic Preparedness Project in 2016. Meanwhile, Wattendorf left DARPA to join the BMGF. A patent dispute between BioNTech and Curevac ended in 2025 when BioNTech bought the company out.
The BMGF’s involvement with BioNTech is perhaps the clearest example of how the Gates Foundation set itself up in advance to profit from the P3 project, otherwise known as Dr Robert Kadlec’s Manhattan Project for Biodefense.
The Gates Foundation was no mere bystander in BioNTech’s mRNA-SARS-CoV2 vaccine project. It was an active facilitator and profiteer.
In August 2019, the Gates Foundation became a minority shareholder in BioNTech, spending $55million to acquire 3,038,674 ordinary shares ahead of BioNTech’s October 2019 Initial Public Offer on the US NASDAQ stock exchange.
It wasn’t a passive investment. As Dr Ugur Sahin, the CEO and founder of BioNTech recounts in his book The Vaccine, he gave a presentation on mRNA at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2020 and on January 15, a Wednesday, he went to Seattle for a meeting with the Gates Foundation. Sahin, who admits he is no infectious disease expert, then returned to Germany. Apparently by Friday, his ‘rigid scientific instincts’ kicked in after seeing news reports on the emerging situation in China and reading an article in the Lancet. ‘I understood immediately that we were going to face two potential scenarios: either a very fast pandemic which killed millions in a couple of months, or a prolonged epidemic situation that would last 16 to 18 months,’ said Sahin.
What finely tuned rigid scientific instincts they must have been. The government of the most populous country on earth had announced the first death from SARS-CoV2 on January 11. By the time Sahin arrived in Seattle on the 15th, the Chinese death toll had doubled to two. The World Health Organization (WHO) hadn’t even been to Wuhan for their preliminary field visit. Nevertheless the founder of an mRNA cancer therapy-developing biotech company, which had no licensed products and had never turned a profit, was about to commit all its resources to producing a new vaccine to tackle this scourge. Despite Dr Sahin saying he initiated the covid vaccine programme after his visit to Seattle, clinical trials documents released via Freedom of Information show BioNTech commenced the first pre-clinical study for its Covid vaccine programme on January 14, using materials it had ordered from the Austrian company Polymun during 2019.
Other developments preceded the Seattle meeting. Apparently senior staff at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) were equally alarmed by the single death in China so they hunkered down over the weekend of January 11 and 12, adapting their Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) vaccine prefusion stabilised design for their collaborator Moderna to make an mRNA-SARS-CoV2 vaccine to counter the ‘novel coronavirus’ that was troubling China. The NIAID Vaccine Research Centre deputy director Dr Barney Graham and his collaborators finalised their ‘prefusion stabilised S-protein’ coronavirus vaccine design for Moderna on January 13.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, finally succeeded in wringing a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) recommendation out of his Emergency Committee on January 27. Following this the then US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had issued a PREP Act indemnity declaration. On February 2, 2020, a senior officer in the BMGF Global Health division, Holger Kanzler, introduced Dr Satin to Dr Barney Graham by email for them to discuss ‘2019-nCoV vaccine immunogen design and the use of the mRNA platform’.
BioNTech’s vaccine is a codon-optimised version of the vaccine Dr Graham designed for Moderna. It is functionally identical to, but has minor gene sequencing differences from, Moderna’s version. Both Moderna and BioNTech pay royalties to the US National Institute of Health for using the NIAID prefusion-stabilised S-protein design. Dr Graham and his team of weekend warriors personally profited as they earn $150,000 per year in perpetuity for every successfully developed product containing their intellectual property.
Pfizer’s role was to commercialise and market the product for BioNTech. It was, of course, all planned. In August 2018 when BioNTech and Pfizer announced they were entering into a ‘flu’ vaccine collaboration agreement, the contract conveniently gave Pfizer right of first refusal for an mRNA-RSV vaccine project. It also made provisions for ‘compassionate use’ of mRNA products developed under the collaboration in the event of ‘emergency pandemic, crisis epidemic’ flu conditions.
Dr Kathrin Jansen, senior vice president and head of Pfizer’s Vaccine Research and Development Unit, said: ‘Innovative vaccine approaches are urgently needed to provide improved protection against seasonal flu, and to respond rapidly and in quantity to pandemic influenza threats. mRNA vaccines offer a novel approach to code for any protein or multiple proteins, and the potential to manufacture higher potency flu vaccines more rapidly and at a lower cost than contemporary flu vaccines.’ Jansen is now a scientific adviser to Apriori Bio, a company set up in 2020 to ‘usher in a new era of AI designed vaccines’ which was founded by Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital firm behind Moderna.
Bill Gates began promoting the experimental mRNA vaccines personally in 2017 when as directed by Jeffrey Epstein, his Foundation launched an international pandemic foundation – the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), the ‘just in case, just in time’ vaccine people. The CEPI foundation is domiciled in Norway, and was launched in conjunction with the World Economic Foundation and the Norwegian Government.
mRNA vaccines had a theoretically easier path to licensure in the European Union due to a 2009 EU Directive creating a regulatory loophole whereby mRNA wasn’t classified as a gene therapy if it was directed at an infectious disease. In contrast, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) classified it as a gene therapy advanced medicine. In September 2019, Dr Ian Hudson, the now disgraced former head of the UK Medicines Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) who had been its licensing director for 12 years, also joined the BMGF Global Health division as a regulatory adviser. He is reported to have been giving advice to teams developing covid vaccines. The key vaccine project for the Gates Foundation was the one it had a financial interest in – the BioNTech mRNA authorised clone of the NIAID-Moderna mRNA vaccine. The MHRA authorisation for use of Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 in 2020, kickstarted the rapid global deployment of the genetic vaccine, even though the version deployed was not the product tested during the Phase 3 clinical trials.
In 2021, the Gates Foundation achieved what every equities investor dreams of – having bought BioNTech’s stock low, it sold it high. The BMGF began selling its BioNTech shares during the summer of 2021 after Pfizer and BioNTech submitted a rolling Biologics License Application (BLA) to the FDA on May 7, 2021. This application to convert its emergency use authorisation into a full marketing authorisation, which would survive the end of the WHO-declared PHEIC pandemic and enable the roll out of new mRNA vaccines, was submitted in advance of the planned conclusion of the Phase 3 clinical trial of BNT162b2 on August 3, 2021. The BLA appears to have been a foregone conclusion. BioNTech’s shares hit their all-time high price of $464 on August 10, 2021, two weeks before the FDA announced on August 23 it was approving a license for Pfizer/BioNTech’s mRNA-SARS-CoV2 vaccine, brand name Comirnaty.
Bill Gates famously tweeted on December 19, 2019: ‘I’m particularly excited about what the next year could mean for one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.’ No wonder he was so excited. He clearly knew his Foundation was poised to make a packet from the PHEIC’d pandemic on its BioNTech investment. The BMGF sold 86 per cent of their BioNTech shares at an average price of $300 per share – 15 times the $18.10 it paid for them. The charitable foundation’s investment arm subsequently paid tax on a mere $18million of the $260million profit it made. Some might say the infrastructure that Epstein and JP Morgan helped shape over the Decade of the Vaccine places the BMGF at the centre of a global drug cartel.
