To reassure public, politicians, and press of its benign purposes, the Rockefeller Foundation declared its ambition to eliminate hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease sent teams of doctors, inspectors, and lab technicians to administer deworming medication across eleven Southern states.55 These ambassadors systematically exaggerated the medication’s efficacy, glossed over its regular fatalities, and—through the graces of Rockefeller’s mercenary army of journalists for hire—ignited enough favorable popular interest for the Foundation to justify the proposed expansion into the colonized world.
The Rockefeller Foundation launched a “public-private partnership” with pharmaceutical companies called the International Health Commission, which set about feverishly inoculating the hapless populations of the colonized tropics with a yellow fever jab.56 The vaccine killed its beneficiaries in droves and failed to prevent yellow fever. The Rockefeller Foundation quietly dropped the useless vaccine after the foundation’s star researcher, the yellow fever vaccine’s inventor, Hideyo Noguchi, succumbed to the disease, likely contracted through careless laboratory exposure.57 Noguchi’s flexible scruples had greased his dicey experimentation on colonized “volunteers” and fueled his meteoric rise in the ethically barren landscapes of virology. At the time of his death, the New York district attorney was investigating Noguchi for illegally experimenting on New York City orphans with syphilis vaccines without the consent of their legal guardians.58
Despite such setbacks, the Rockefeller Foundation’s yellow fever project caught the approbatory attention of army planners on the lookout for remedies against the tropical diseases that hamstrung the US military’s expanding retinue of equatorial adventures. In 1916, the board’s president made an early observation about the utility of biosecurity as a tool of imperialism: “For purposes of placating primitive and suspicious peoples, medicine has some advantages over machine guns.”59
The Rockefeller Foundation’s carefully heralded public health attainments eclipsed popular revulsion for the many abuses Americans associated with the Standard Oil petroleum empire. After World War I, its patronage of the League of Nations Health Organization gave the Rockefeller Foundation global reach and an impressive cortège of high-level contacts among the international elites. As the century progressed, the foundation became an exquisitely connected global enterprise with regional offices in Mexico City, Paris, New Delhi, and Cali. From 1913 to 1951, the Rockefeller Foundation’s health division operated in more than eighty countries.60 The Rockefeller Foundation was the world’s de facto authority on how best to manage global diseases, with influence dwarfing all other nonprofits or government actors working in the field.61 The Rockefeller Foundation provided almost half of the budget for the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) following its founding in 1922 and populated LNHO ranks with its veterans and favorites. The RF imbued the League with its philosophy, structure, values, precepts, and ideologies, all of which its successor body, the WHO, inherited at its inauguration in 1948.
By the time John D. Rockefeller disbanded the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Division in 1951, it had spent the equivalent of billions of dollars on tropical disease campaigns in almost 100 countries and colonies. But these projects were window dressing for the Foundation’s more venal preoccupations, according to a 2017 report, U.S. Philanthrocapitalism and the Global Health Agenda.62 That idée fixe was opening developing world markets for US oil, mining, pharmaceutical, telecom, and banking multinationals in which the Foundation and the Rockefeller family were also invested. That white paper made the same complaints against the Rockefeller Foundation that contemporary critics level against the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
But the RF rarely addressed the most important causes of death, notably infantile diarrhea and tuberculosis, for which technical fixes were not then available and which demanded long-term, socially oriented investments, such as improved housing, clean water, and sanitation systems. The RF avoided disease campaigns that might be costly, complex, or time-consuming (other than yellow fever, which imperiled [the military, and] commerce). Most campaigns were narrowly construed so that quantifiable targets (insecticide spraying or medication distribution, for example) could be set, met, and counted as successes, then presented in business-style quarterly reports. In the process, RF public health efforts stimulated economic productivity, expanded consumer markets, and prepared vast regions for foreign investment and incorporation into the expanding system of global capitalism.63
Here was a business model tailor-made for Bill Gates.
Philanthrocapitalism
Gates has dubbed his foundation’s operational philosophy “philanthrocapitalism.” Here is a stripped-down explanation of how philanthrocapitalism functions: Bill and Melinda Gates donated $36 billion of Microsoft stock to the BMGF between 1994 and 2020.64 Very early on, Gates created a separate entity, Bill Gates Investments (BGI), which manages his personal wealth and his foundation’s corpus. Renamed BMGI in January 2015 to include Melinda,65 the company predominantly invests that loot in multinational food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, energy, telecom, and tech companies with global operations. Federal tax laws require the BMGF to give away 7 percent of its foundation assets annually to qualify for tax exemption. Gates strategically targets BMGF’s charitable gifts to give him control of the international health and agricultural agencies and the media, allowing him to dictate global health and food policies so as to increase profitability of the large multinationals in which he and his foundation hold large investment positions. Following such tactics, the Gates Foundation has given away some $54.8 billion since 1994, but instead of depleting his wealth, those strategic gifts have magnified it.66 Strategic philanthropizing increased the Gates Foundation’s capital corpus to $49.8 billion by 2019. Moreover, Gates’s personal net worth grew from $63 billion in 2000 to $133.6 billion today.67 Gates’s wealth expanded by $23 billion just during the 2020 lockdowns that he and Dr. Fauci played key roles in orchestrating.
In 2017, the Huffington Post observed that the Gates Foundation blurs “the boundaries between philanthropy, business and nonprofits” and cautions that calling Gates’s investment strategy “philanthropy” was causing “the rapid deconstruction of the accepted term.”68
Gates’s pharmaceutical investments are particularly relevant to this chapter. Since shortly after its founding, his foundation has owned stakes in multiple drug companies. A recent investigation by The Nation revealed that the Gates Foundation currently holds corporate stocks and bonds in drug companies like Merck, GSK, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Novartis, and Sanofi.69 Gates also has heavy positions in Gilead, Biogen, AstraZeneca, Moderna, Novavax, and Inovio. The foundation’s website candidly declares its mission to “seek more effective models of collaboration with major vaccine manufacturers to better identify and pursue mutually beneficial opportunities.”70