"Recipients Reluctant To Bite The Hand That Feeds Them": Tim Schwab on the Gates-Epstein Saga & What It Means for Global Health

Readers,

There are numerous, parallel, ongoing efforts by academics, activists, journalists, and professionals to infuse greater reflexivity in global health. There is room to do much more.

In this edition, we bring you an important interview with American journalist Tim Schwab, where he addresses the imperative to discuss philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates, and the fall out on global health as a result of Gates' documented association with - financier and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Gates has arguably been one of the most influential funders in global health, in Geneva and in national capitals. Media attention has only increased in light of the Epstein affair. We believe this interview not only sheds light on the precariousness of global health financing as shaped by select donors such as Gates, and more importantly, on the grave violations of rights of women and girls victimized in the Epstein power play.

We hope you find this illuminating. We are grateful to Schwab for educating our readers on the disturbing ambivalence in global health funding on this issue, and on raising the questions we should not shy away from. Schwab thinks Gates' political capital is waning.

The implications for global health are real. Billionaire investor Warren Buffett has indicated that his annual donations to the foundation may not continue because of the unfolding scandal, Schwab says.

I. THE GENEVA HEALTH FILES INTERVIEW

"Recipients Reluctant to Bite The Hand That Feeds Them": Tim Schwab on the Gates-Epstein Saga & What It Means for Global Health

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist based in Washington DC. He responded to queries by Geneva Health Files in a long-ranging interview, that pieces together how we should begin to understand the impact of the Gates-Epstein association on global health.

His extensive reporting on the Gates Foundation, which includes the 2023 book "The Bill Gates Problem," has been recognized with a Deadline Club Award, Izzy Award, New York Times Editor's Choice, and Booklist starred review. His book is currently available in 8 languages. He currently writes on Substack (here) and can be reached by email at: timschwab2020@gmail.com.

We reached the Gates Foundation for comment. But received no response. See their public statement on this matter here.

[Geneva Health Files] Q1. What are the immediate implications from the Gates-Epstein saga for global health?

[Tim Schwab]:

We are already seeing significant damage to the reputation of the Gates Foundation. When Bill Gates appeared in Washington DC earlier this month to answer Congressional questions about Epstein, the scandal generated a fresh wave of punishing headlines. One member of Congress described Gates as having been “willing to do a deal with the devil if it meant funding for global health.” CNN went on to post a poll showing how significantly Gates’s popularity has plummeted.

In my reporting, I’ve talked to Gates Foundation insiders who are outraged by the scandal. One group posted an (anonymous) petition calling on the foundation—-which has ferociously marketed itself as a champion of women’s empowerment—to deal with the Epstein scandal. Meanwhile, the student newspaper at the University of Washington in Seattle has published an editorial calling for the Gates family name to be removed from the many buildings the family has sponsored across campus.

The sentiment being articulated, essentially, is that taking Gates Foundation donations means participating in reputation laundering, or legitimizing blood money.

In another episode in India, under immense political pressure, Bill Gates was compelled to cancel a major appearance at an artificial intelligence conference–because his ongoing Epstein scandal would be too big of a distraction.

So, on the global stage we’re seeing his political capital taking a huge hit. This, again, has consequences on global health—because so much of what the Gates Foundation does is trying to politically influence public health policies at the government level.

The immediate fallout from the Gates-Epstein scandal can also be measured in dollars. One of the Gates Foundation’s biggest public supporters, billionaire investor Warren Buffett, recently said in an interview that his annual donations to the foundation may not continue because of the unfolding Gates-Epstein scandal. That’s billions of dollars a year the foundation—and global health—may lose in revenue.

This follows an earlier decision Buffett made to to cut the Gates Foundation out of something like $100 billion in donations he planned to give the philanthropy following his death. These are huge sums of money that won’t be going into Gates’s global-health work (and, likely, won’t go into other global health projects).

Buffett also recently stated that he thinks the Epstein scandal might provoke a wholesale reappraisal of American philanthropy from Congress, with new rules and regulations coming down the pike.

When Trump was first elected, I started writing about the likelihood of the Gates Foundation facing some kind of government scrutiny because Bill Gates is so widely loathed by the political right. Trump–and Bill Gates’s rival, Elon Musk–have already gravely hurt the Gates Foundation through major cuts to foreign aid budgets. With the Epstein scandal escalating there is a very realistic possibility that the federal government takes a hard look at the Gates Foundation, which benefits from billions of dollars in subsidies from American taxpayers.

But it’s also a mistake to under-estimate Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation, or to ignore the incredible political influence they still have in Washington. That’s true more generally of American philanthropy––a trillion-dollar industry that has significant money and the power, which would aggressively deploy its resources to fight any Congressional efforts at regulation.

[GHF] Q2. Why is it important for the global health community to acknowledge, name and address the association of Bill Gates with Epstein?

[TS]

As Bill Gates has now acknowledged, his association with Epstein had the effect of normalizing the sexual predator, of inviting him into polite society and welcoming him into the most elite levels of global philanthropy—and also global health.

When news recently surfaced that Epstein played a central role in the Gates Foundation’s polio work in Pakistan, one physician explained the repercussions in terms of giving “more oxygen to anti-vaccine hysteria and put[ting] millions of Pakistani children at risk. Just the thought of Gates and Epstein ‘helping’ children is enough to give any parent nightmares.” In this way, the Gates-Epstein scandal damages the reputation, and the aims, of a much broader global health community.

If global health organizations continue to partner with the Gates Foundation—making no serious demands for accountability—this normalizes and legitimizes the foundation’s reckless behavior, and also that of Epstein, who abused hundreds girls and women. By the time the Gates Foundation began collaborating with Jeffrey Epstein, the pedophile had already served time in prison for a sex crime involving a minor.

Troublingly, we still don’t know the full scope and nature of the Gates-Epstein relationship, as Bill Gates’s account has been marked by contradictions and omissions.

When my book came out in 2023, some reviewers criticized my decision to prominently put the Gates-Epstein scandal in the second chapter. I guess they thought this was tabloid-y or unfair to the revered humanitarian. But I knew how consequential the issue was for the foundation because the scandal said so much about the character of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation.

Gates thought that Epstein could be useful—to raise philanthropic funds, or to help Gates win a Nobel Peace Prize or maybe for other reasons—so he chose to overlook his behavior, deploying an ends-justifies-the-means ethos. You see that again and again in the history of the Gates Foundation, like Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation positioning their investments to benefit from the immiseration of humanity—whether it is the genocide in Gaza, Trump’s assault on immigrants, or the fossil-fuel industry's destruction of the climate.

Probably the more salient lesson is about how the super wealthy, like Gates and Epstein, play by different rules than the rest of us. Extreme wealth allows the rich to hurt and dehumanize others without checks, balances or consequences (at least for a time). That’s bad for society, for democracy and for humanity.

[GHF] Q3 Why, according to you, has there been such little recognition of this?

[TS]

The obvious reason is money, itself. The billions of dollars that the foundation puts into global health make recipients reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. This has always been a powerful force in limiting debate and suppressing criticism around the Gates Foundation.

But there comes a point when not having an open, honest debate becomes a major liability for the credibility of the whole of global health.

It is especially difficult to challenge Gates right now because so much other funding has dried up. This is an under appreciated dynamic; as governments have slashed foreign aid funding, the Gates Foundation’s financial influence has only become more powerful.

I don’t think this is Gates’s plan or ambition, but it nevertheless has been unsettling to see Gates’s eagerness to genuflect to Trump, and his reluctance to challenge him.

[GHF] Q4. What should international organizations, governments big and small, media, academic institutions, that accept funding from the Gates Foundation do, if they are largely dependent on the grants for their activities?

As a journalist, I’ll answer this question in the context of the many newsrooms that have chosen to take funding from the Gates Foundation, often for reporting on global health. The hundreds of millions of dollars the philanthropy has put into journalism has presided over a one-sided body of reporting that amplifies Gates’s reputation, softens criticism, diminishes diversity and narrows the spectrum of debate. For these reasons, I’ve long argued that newsrooms should immediately stop taking funding from the Gates Foundation.

This is a good prescription more generally.

I get that for folks working in global health it is difficult to say ‘no’ to the Gates Foundation’s money. But I wish more of the field was really being honest about the problems with saying ‘yes.’ Asking the global poor to depend on billionaires to access public health is not just a bad model in theory, but a terribly fragile model in practice. We never should have allowed a single man to have the level of influence Gates has.

The Epstein scandal—and the many other scandals the foundation has been involved in over the years—raise very important questions about what, if any, role the Gates Foundation, or any billionaire-led philanthropy, should have in public health.

Billionaires are flawed and fickle—and they are mortal. Over time they will die or fall into disgrace or change their mind. If you make your organization, or your entire field, dependent on a billionaire, you’re building an extremely vulnerable and totally unsustainable model. The ultimate harms, of course, flow to the poorest people on Earth.

[GHF] Q5. Some argue that the Gates Foundation is a legal entity whose activities should be considered separate, and distinct, from Gates's involvement with Epstein. According to you, what should the Gates Foundation do?

[TS]

I think this is a rationalization—and totally dishonest. The Gates Foundation, institutionally, was deeply involved with Epstein. It wasn’t just Bill Gates. Many top-level foundation staff were meeting and corresponding with Epstein for years, as I’ve uncovered in my reporting on the Epstein files.

At the same time that the Gates Foundation made the institutional decision to pursue a years-long philanthropic collaboration with Epstein, the foundation was also aggressively marketing itself as a champion of women’s empowerment, and positioning itself to have very significant influence over the groups working in this space. Perhaps no organization in the world did more to immunize Jeffrey Epstein from scrutiny—and justice—than the Gates Foundation, which eagerly shared its humanitarian halo with the pedophile. Even as the Gates-Epstein scandal has snowballed over the last six years, the foundation has done virtually nothing to atone for or repair the damage it caused.

A few months ago, I argued that both Bill Gates and the entire Gates Foundation board, including its CEO, should be removed because of Epstein. The foundation would be far more effective if it were directed by independent, public-minded directors, not by Bill Gates and a gaggle of yes-men and elites. Or we could simply dismantle the foundation, deeming it too big and too powerful to be compatible with democracy. Gates’s wealth should be directed toward public benefit through taxation, not philanthropy.

[GHF] Q6. What are the lessons that the international development community must draw from this episode to avoid such predicaments in the future? (Drop in global health funding means greater reliance on such actors.)

[TS]

One way or the other, we need to put the ‘public’ back into public health—and other public policies. Allowing a billionaire with big ideas to buy a seat at the decision-making table is not just undemocratic. It is oligarchic. As the public debate around oligarchy becomes more and more mainstream, it is very important to understand that Bill Gates is very much a case study in the harms of extreme wealth. He’s not an exceptional or ‘good’ billionaire. He’s a problem, not a solution.

TIM SCHWAB'S BOOK:

More from Tim Schwab:

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"Recipients Reluctant To Bite The Hand That Feeds Them": Tim Schwab on the Gates-Epstein Saga & What It Means for Global Health

I. THE GENEVA HEALTH FILES INTERVIEW

"Recipients Reluctant to Bite The Hand That Feeds Them": Tim Schwab on the Gates-Epstein Saga & What It Means for Global Health