Reading Progress:

Yes, Fauci and Gates Do Have Ties to COVID-19 Vaccine Maker

by Sep 16, 2020Health Freedom, Articles, Economic Freedom35 comments

Bill Gates with NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci at the NIH in June 2017 (Photo by NIH, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
A USA Today headline falsely claiming Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have “no ties” to Moderna is illustrative of a major problem with our media.

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USA Today’s Misinformation

On September 11, USA Today published an article with a headline declaring, “Fact check: Fauci, Gates, Epstein and Soros have no ties to drug company Moderna”.

But that headline was false.

Both Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and member of the White House coronavirus task force, and Bill Gates do have ties to Moderna, a pharmaceutical company developing a COVID-19 vaccine using mRNA technology.

The article does rightly identify misinformation presented in a video widely shared on social media.

With respect to Fauci, USA Today notes that the video’s claim that Fauci was the first CEO of Moderna is false. Nevertheless, Fauci does have ties to Moderna.

Similarly, the article notes that the video’s claim that Fauci and Gates were college roommates is false. But Gates, too, nevertheless does have direct ties to Moderna.

In fact, USA Today contradicts its own headline by acknowledging that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “is listed as one of Moderna’s collaborators” on the company’s page at the investor website Flagship Pioneering.

The closest connection USA Today acknowledges with Fauci is his having been “a co-reviewer of a vaccine platform Moderna is working to improve”, as indicated by a 2019 Shareholder Letter. This refers to a review of vaccine technologies Fauci coauthored that was published last year in the journal Nature Reviews Immunology.

Although USA Today doesn’t mention it, the same letter, under the subheading “Partnerships”, mentions having $187 million in funding from grants, with a footnote reference. The footnote specifies that the grants are from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

BARDA operates under the Department of Health and Human Services. DARPA is a research and development agency of the Department of Defense.

That both Fauci and Gates have close ties to Moderna is no secret. Having encountered the headline in a news feed, I knew it was false and so did a quick Google search to document its falsity. It took about ten seconds to fact check USA Today’s “Fact Check”.

My search immediately turned up a page published in March on the website of the NIAID, which operates under the National Institutes of Health (NIH), announcing the beginning of a phase one clinical trial for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. The webpage notes that Fauci’s NIAID is “funding the trial.”

Furthermore, Moderna’s candidate vaccine “was developed by NIAID scientists and their collaborators” at Moderna.

The page quotes Fauci saying that the trial was “an important step” toward developing “a safe and effective vaccine to prevent infection with SARS-CoV-2”.

Similarly, I was able to immediately pull up a page from Moderna’s website listing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as a “strategic collaborator”, with the foundation having “entered a global health project framework agreement” in January 2016 “to advance mRNA-based development projects for various infectious disases.”

The original USA Today headline falsely claimed that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have "no ties" to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna
The original USA Today headline falsely claimed that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have “no ties” to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna

I emailed the author and the corrections editor on September 13 to request that they correct their false headline and acknowledge the NIAID’s partnership with Moderna, in accordance with USA Today’s code of ethics.

I also pointed out that, even if they were unaware of that partnership, since the collaboration between the Gates Foundation and Moderna is acknowledged in the article, they knew that their headline was false. I also noted the hypocrisy of fact checking others while willfully misinforming the public themselves.

Two days later, I received a reply from the author, Chelsey Cox, thanking me for my comments but sticking to the headline with the reasoning that “The headline reflects the analysis of the claim subject to fact-checking.”

I replied, “It does not follow that since the claims about Fauci and Gates subject to fact-checking are false that therefore they have ‘no ties’ to Moderna. That is a non sequitur fallacy. Indeed, you point out yourself in the article that Gates does have ties to Moderna, his foundation being partnered with the company. The headline is false and should, by USA Today’s own ethical guidelines, be corrected.”

She responded later that day to let me know that she’d gotten an editor’s approval to change the headline, which now reads, “Fact check: Moderna post makes false claims about Fauci, Gates, Soros, Epstein”. (That’s also not a great title since it makes it sounds as though Moderna itself was spreading the misinformation, but at least the false claim about Fauci and Gates having “no ties” to Moderna was removed.)

USA Today did not publish an acknowledgement of the error and did not update the article to acknowledge that Fauci, like Gates, is partnered with Moderna in the development of its COVID-19 vaccine.

The USA Today/Gannett Building in McLean, Virginia (Photo by Patrickneil, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)
The USA Today/Gannett Building in McLean, Virginia (Photo by Patrickneil, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Who Will Fact-Check the Mainstream Media?

The spread of misinformation is a serious problem in our society today. But the mainstream narrative is that it’s coming from individuals on social media or alternative media websites. The reality is that the greatest purveyors of misinformation are the government and mainstream media.

Notice that the mainstream media’s self-proclaimed “fact checkers” don’t fact check each other despite endless opportunities to do so. Instead, they focus on “debunking” information from alternative sources.

The use of the term “fake news” is illustrative. The corporate media accuse alternative sources of propagating “fake news” to maintain their own dominance as purveyors of misinformation, such as the unevidenced conspiracy theory propagated by the New York Times that the Russian government hacked the US election infrastructure in 2016.

To illustrate, a New York Times editorial published in November 2019 pointed out that oppressive regimes had been using the term to dismiss criticisms over human rights violations, then blamed this phenomenon on Donald Trump for having repeatedly referred to mainstream media sources as propagating “fake news”. It was Trump, they alleged, who gave rise to “the epithet of ‘fake news’ as a weapon”.

But that was a blatant lie. In fact, it was the New York Times and other mainstream media who had weaponized the term “fake news” by attacking online independent journalism that threatens both the business model of the major corporate media and the political agendas those corporations tend to align themselves with.

In this case, mainstream media’s political agenda was to manufacture consent for the censorship of information from alternative media sources on social media.

When Donald Trump started using the term “fake news”, he was mockingly throwing their own label back at them to emphasize their hypocrisy.

That episode was in keeping with the function of the media outlined by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal treatise Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

So-called “fact check” articles frequently fulfil this function by misinforming the public.

For example, a Lead Stories “fact check” cited by Facebook to flag a post about the infection fatality rate of SARS-CoV-2 as false was itself guilty of lying, falsely claiming that it was a frightening 1.3 percent when that figure was not even an estimate of the infection fatality rate.

For another example, the website FactCheck.org has falsely claimed that the mercury used in flu shots, and formerly in numerous other vaccines on the CDC’s routine childhood schedule, is harmless and that science has proven that vaccines don’t cause autism. The website’s source for these assertions was the CDC’s website and a 2004 review by the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The CDC in turn also cites several observational studies and the IOM review. Yet the IOM in fact acknowledged that the mercury-based preservative thimerosol is a “known neurotoxin” that “accumulates in the brain” and “can injure the nervous system”.

The IOM also acknowledged that the hypothesis that vaccines can contribute to the development of autism in susceptible children cannot be excluded by observational studies and, moreover, that none of the studies included in their review were actually designed to test that hypothesis.

Censorship of truthful information is a growing problem.

In February 2019, Congressman Adam B. Schiff sent letters to the CEOs of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, essentially calling on these companies to help the government censor any information about vaccines that wasn’t in line with the goals of public vaccine policy.

Ostensibly, the purpose was to combat “misinformation” about vaccines, but his criteria applied only to what he termed “anti-vaccine” information and were inclusive of any information, no matter truthful and well-grounded in science, that might lead parents to “decline to follow the recommended vaccination schedule.”

Schiff himself blatantly lied about vaccine safety in the letter by asserting that there is “no evidence to suggest that vaccines cause life-threatening or disabling diseases”.

In keeping with that perceived duty, Facebook has, for example, flagged a post saying that vaccines can cause encephalopathy as “False”, citing a “fact check” article by Health Feedback. (Encephalopathy encompasses any type of brain damage, disorder or disease, including encephalitis, or brain inflammation.)

Yet the vaccine manufacturer Merck in its bestselling medical textbook the Merck Manual states explicitly that “Encephalitis can occur as a secondary immunologic complication of certain viral infections or vaccinations.”

And the US government, under its Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which along with legal immunity for vaccine manufacturers serves to shift the financial burden for injuries away from the pharmaceutical companies and onto the taxpaying consumers, lists encephalopathy and encephalitis as compensable vaccine injuries.

In a famous case, a girl named Hannah Poling developmentally regressed into diagnosed autism after receiving nine vaccine doses at once at 19 months of age. The government acknowledged the vaccinations “significantly aggravated an underlying mitochondrial disorder, which predisposed her to deficits in cellular energy metabolism, and manifested as a regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder.”

Another Facebook “Fact Check” cites an AFP article and a Lead Stories article to flag a video as false for reporting that the World Health Organization’s chief scientist had been caught lying to the public about vaccine safety. Both “Fact Check” articles denied that the WHO chief scientist had lied.

Yet neither of those articles bothered to explain how the report was untrue when the scientist had in fact claimed in a WHO video published on YouTube that “robust vaccine safety systems” exist in countries around the globe that enable scientists working closely with the WHO to ensure that vaccines are administered “without risks” only to admit a few days later to her colleagues in a WHO meeting that “we cannot overemphasize the fact that we really don’t have very good safety monitoring systems in many countries” and that the risk of serious adverse events being discovered only after a vaccine is on the market is “always there”.

The push for censorship of inconvenient truths has gotten so bad that a study in the journal Vaccine has equated even messages that simply emphasize that we have a right to informed consent with vaccine “misinformation”.

That study was widely cited by the media as having shown that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s organization Children’s Health Defense was the top spreader of vaccine “misinformation” via Facebook ads even though it didn’t produce even a single example of such an ad.

Ironically, the study did produce an example of a “pro-vaccine” ad that the authors had no problem with even though it falsely communicated that science had proven that the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer when, in truth, as noted in January in a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, none of the clinical trials used by the manufacturers to obtain licensure were designed to determine the vaccine’s effectiveness against cervical cancer, and whether the vaccine prevents cancer remains unknown.

Bill Gates with NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci at the NIH in June 2017 (Photo by the NIH, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
Bill Gates with NIH Director Francis Collins and NIAID Director Anthony Fauci at the NIH in June 2017 (Photo by NIH, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)

It’s Up to Us to Hold the Media Accountable

The problem of censorship and mainstream misinformation is a serious one with frightening implications. Just as mainstream misinformation manufactured consent for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, so is it being used today to manufacture consent for extreme and harmful “lockdown” measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and for vaccine mandates.

Together, these political agendas pushed by the mainstream media raise the threat that any COVID-19 vaccine that goes through the FDA’s vaccine approval process to get to market will be mandated.

We must fight against that authoritarian agenda.

There are a number of things you can do to help fight this threat.

First, don’t spread misinformation on social media. Think critically, question your own assumptions, and check your confirmation bias. Take the time to try to verify information to make sure it checks out. We do not want to be legitimizing accusations of spreading misinformation because it plays right into the hands of those who wish to censor our voices.

Second, do keep spreading truthful information that the establishment wants to keep from the public. Social media is a very useful tool for circumventing the gatekeepers and challenging mainstream propaganda narratives. That’s precisely why people like Congressman Adam Schiff want social media platforms like Facebook to censor information on behalf of the government. When you read quality articles containing important and verifiable information that mainstream media consumers just aren’t otherwise getting, be sure to share it.

Third, when you encounter media content that is misinforming the public, make an effort to hold them accountable. Write to the authors and editors to respectfully request corrections to false information, providing them with any documentation necessary to prove that their claims are untrue. (I thank my own readers for identifying errors in my own writings on occasion, which I correct with published acknowledgments.)

Fourth, when you encounter mainstream misinformation, hold it up as an example to educate others about how they are being deceived and how the media tend to serve the function of manufacturing consent for harmful government policies. Share the information and explain to your friends, family, and followers on social media why the claim or narrative is false and what the truth is.

You don’t have to be an independent journalist to take a stand and take action against the threats posed by mainstream misinformation and propaganda narratives. We all have an important role to play in seeking truth and spreading it for the betterment of humanity.

You may find yourself personally attacked for speaking out. But with knowledge comes the confidence to face the bullies who will call you names and attack your character rather than substantively addressing your legitimate argument.

You may also find yourself censored. Facebook has penalized my page, for example, for sharing a few pieces of content it falsely flagged as misinformative while itself spreading misinformation through its supposed “fact check” articles.

For another example, on a local newspaper’s post quoting Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, encouraging people to get a flu shot, I commented by stating findings from studies that didn’t align with that policy goal and sharing links to those studies in the medical literature; and the newspaper responded by deleting my comments and banning me from their page. So, I fought back by encouraging my readers to confront them for censoring science to push flu shots, and they ultimately resorted to censoring themselves and deleting their post to prevent their audience from learning the truth about both the science and their cowardly and intellectually dishonest censorship.

There is an information war on. We must all do our part to educate ourselves and share empowering knowledge with others. We must also hold media institutions accountable to a higher standard. Our future depends on it.

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  • Fred says:

    A really pertinent article.
    Who would have thought that, even after having been corrected, USA Today would simply persist in maintaining its false claims?
    What a disgusting news provider this has become, while still claiming its name: USA Today?
    It seems to me that using this name is no longer a guarantee of quality, or even mediocrity.
    Apparently the owner of the USA Today publication does not have any idea what integrity means.

  • Edwin Pyle says:

    Jeremy: thanks again! Keep em accountable. Your my go to researcher/ writer.

  • Elizabeth Samways says:

    This new patent, WOWO2020060606 (published as WO/2020/060606) has conspiracy theorists buzzing. As this news makes the rounds online, people are referring to it as “Patent 666”, or “World Order 2020, 666”. The going argument is not only did Bill Gates and Microsoft conspire to unleash COVID-19, but they’re also going to step in with the “cure”. They’ll have a hand in a vaccine that everyone will willfully take to be rid of coronavirus fears, but it will secretly microchip them, allowing Gates and Co. to track everyone. Since the title on the patent clearly reads “CRYPTOCURRENCY SYSTEM USING BODY ACTIVITY DATA” this is evidence that Bill’s plans, the microchip theory, and the planned release of COVID-19 are all very real.

    Considering our English Prime Minister Boris Johnson is buying this vaccine from Moderna by the millions and Gates wants to micochip the world popluation, he will take full opportunity to do so, all becoming extremely scary. We have to warn everyone of this danger.

  • Lee says:

    Thank you, Jeremy, for persisting that USA Today correct their inaccuracies and calling them out on their B.S.! Bravo!

  • Fred says:

    Just as the false claims about Iraq’s intent to destroy humanity resulted in the invasion and destruction of an entire country, killing thousand of civilians by those who wanted to “save humanity” while reporters, not linked to the military, who documented crimes committed by the military were simply treated as traitors or incarcerated.
    The so called dangerous virus, resulting in many deaths, must not be closely investigated. It must be accepted as is (for whatever that is.) Any one who questions the validity of the research is ridiculed and treated as imbecile. Fact checking is allowed only as long as some facts are ignored that do not go in the right direction supporting the claims of Gates et al.
    I know those people in the above picture know no shame, but I still find it impossible to understand.

  • Michael Moritz says:

    Thank you again Jeremy! This, if anything, is a David and Goliath dilemma. Having said that, through your research, I am gaining confidence and whole-heartedly stand with you and the growing numbers of truth tellers here and abroad.
    Have you seen “Focus on Fauci”? I feel this will be devastating to deeply corrupted American corporatized political structure.

  • David W. Tubman says:

    I recently saw a short video clip of someone taking the swap from a Covid-19 test kit apart. Also comparing it to a Q-Tip cotton swab. The test swab filament she held in the tweezers was silvery and several strands were actually moving. What’s that about?

  • Bryan says:

    Bravo Sir Bravo!!! This is the best article I have read thus far and I will be spreading it far and wide!!! God Bless You and everything you stand for!!!

  • Andreas Daras says:

    Excellent reporting !!!!

    I would like to see YOU every night delivering the prime time news….

    If you show up, I will start watching again

  • Beth Malaga says:

    Wow! What an excellent article! You really went deep and dug with your investigative journalism, well done!
    As someone who was trained in Journalism in college, I have great respect for “real journalism”, something that is very hard to find these days!

    • Thank you! Actually, the thing about this one is that I didn’t have to dig deep at all to show how the USA Today article was misinforming readers. A few quick Google searches was sufficient to find information proving that the claim Fauci and Gates have no ties to COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers is false!

  • Who trusts fact checkers, government, social media, etc?

  • MARJORIE Van Camp says:

    There was a time citizens felt obligated to learn as much about diseases and medications to be personally informed. In today’s society the opposite is true anything heard watched or read becomes fact and is accepted as truth. We all need to view media hype as questionable and make every effort to learn the actual facts!

  • kipper says:

    EVERONE NEEDS to hear what this vaccine scientist has to say, he has just put his career on the line. http://bit.ly/GeertV

  • James Tiberius Parry says:

    The adherence to facts is only one aspect of the struggle people face, and I agree that the USA T article does cross the line. It matter-of-factly describes no association between Gates and Fauci with Moderna whatsoever, which we know isn’t entirely true. It does however toe the line that there’s no hand-in-glove relationship there either. It’s not for anyone to fill in the gaps, even with innuendo, for what isn’t known as concrete fact. The thin end of the wedge is always going to be the delivery of the slope depending on the individual who processes the facts as they laid out for consumption.

    • Christy says:

      Does there necessarily have to be a “hand in glove” relationship for these people to be collaborating? I don’t think so, in fact they probably go out of their way to keep their associations vague, especially now. It IS for us to “fill the gaps” and dig deeper. Every author, because we are human, will put their mark on what they write about, it is inevitable, but Mr. Hammond does a good job of presenting what few want to discuss. We are being manipulated – at every turn and at the highest level.

      • You’re right, there doesn’t necessarily need to be an open partnership for these actors to be collaborating. But the fact that in this case there is highlights the total ineptitude and duplicitousness of the mainstream media, illustrating how they do policy advocacy rather than journalism, serving a propaganda function.

  • K says:

    Thankyou for this very valuable information. Thankyou for fact checking…. for spreading truth!

  • LOL says:

    Of course! They funded the media and the so-called ‘fact checkers’ too. Plenty of censorship on social media as well.

    Do you know how I came to your website? I had to use DuckDuckGo as the search engine. The search terms: ‘Bill Gates Moderna’. Nothing showed up on Google.

    Big tech has already sold out… but I get the feeling I’m preaching to the choir here.

    It’s not just a American thing, it’s the same script played out all over the world.

  • Christy says:

    Thank you. This is one of the best articles on misinformation that I have found, if not the best. Excellent writing, so well thought out and presented.

    • He provides no sources for any of his claims, like his claim that “In 2002 the weaponization of corona virus was complete” and suggestion that SARS was a lab creation. I’ve investigated numerous of his claims from various interviews and each time found that he was mischaracterizing the documents he was citing to support his claims. I find him untrustworthy.

  • Butera Boxford says:

    Google deleted my account for posting a link to a government website re: NCVIA on YouTube.

    I can’t help but wonder if it’s because Alphabet/Google/YouTube is conspiring with Vaccitech in the creation of the next “safe & effective” mandatory vaccine.

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