Tech Won't Save Us - Is Bill Gates a “Good” Billionaire? w/ Tim Schwab

Episode Date: March 11, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss how Bill Gates wields his wealth to shape public policy, the many conflicts of interest of Bill and his Foundation, and how legitimate criticism of power is being positioned as conspiracy.Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose recent work on the Gates Foundation has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Review of Journalism, and the British Medical Journal. Follow Tim on Twitter as @TimothyWSchwab.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Tim wrote about the Gates Foundation’s conflicts of interest, in particular during the pandemic. He also wrote about how Gates’ funding of media and health data produces accountability and transparency problems.Paris had a viral thread about Gates’ intervention in the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, after which an interview said it was a conspiracy theory.After getting the rights to the Oxford vaccine, AstraZeneca ran into trouble in clinical trials.The Associated Press found three factories in Bangladesh alone that could be producing vaccines if patent protections were waived.The Mail and Guardian in South Africa published an article on Bill Gates’ complicity in vaccine apartheid and the author’s Twitter account was locked for tweeting about it.In 2015, Thomas Piketty talked to the BBC about the problems with billionaire philanthropy.Support the show

I really think you have to look at the Gates Foundation as a political organization because it's using its charitable dollars to influence public policy, always. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tim Schwab. Tim is an investigative journalist who's written for The Nation, the Columbia Review Journalism, the British Medical Journal, among others. His recent work has focused on the Gates Foundation, and that's what we'll be talking about today. Throughout the pandemic, Bill Gates has been treated as this kind of oracle who can tell us everything about what vaccines should be had, about the severity of the pandemic, about what kind of response we should be having to protect people. There's been

very little critical attention paid to what Gates has been doing during the pandemic. And when those voices have received some attention, they've often been treated as conspiracy theorists or people who are misunderstanding what's actually going on and what Bill Gates is actually doing. But I think Tim's work is really important because it shows us the relationships between the Gates Foundation and many media outlets that give it positive coverage. Between the Gates Foundation and many media outlets that give it positive coverage. Between the Gates Foundation and many of the private companies that are delivering the solutions it claims are essential for public health and education around the world, while being designed to benefit not just those

private companies, but in many cases, the actual endowment of the foundation itself that is invested in those companies. And in particular, between the Gates Foundation and vaccine manufacturers, where Gates is promoting the idea that we need strong intellectual property and patent protections or else we'll have vaccines that will not be very effective and won't work as well, and that naturally serves the bottom lines of big pharma. As more and more billionaires look to embark down this path of philanthropy to rehabilitate their images as Gates has successfully done, I think it provides even more reason to look at the actual impact of the Gates Foundation so we can see how it utilizes

its power to benefit private actors and how other billionaires will likely do the same as they get more involved in their philanthropic endeavors. There's a real threat here to democracy and to the power of the public to push back against these private solutions because these billionaires have so much power to direct public policy and to decide what initiatives are actually taken to address global problems. In the episode, Tim describes how he knows of multiple Twitter users whose accounts have been locked or whose tweets have been deleted after tweeting about Bill Gates and COVID-19. I just wanted to further back up what Tim has been saying because when I promoted

the podcast the day before it aired, my Twitter account was also locked just for promoting the podcast and mentioning the fact that Bill Gates has supported patent protections against vaccines that are needed to combat COVID-19. I think it just further supports Tim's point that using algorithms in particular on these social media platforms to figure out what misinformation and disinformation is with regard to COVID-19 can conflate legitimate criticism of these powerful individuals with conspiracy theories that come from the right. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And if you want to find out more about

the other shows in the network, you can go to harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues you think would enjoy it. Every episode of Tech Won't Save Us is free for anyone, and that's because of support from listeners like you. So if you like the show and want to support the work that I put into making it every week, you can join supporters like Zach Ripka and Cassius by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation. Tim, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me, Paris. Really exciting to be here.

I'm excited to speak with you. Obviously, you've done a lot of reporting over the past year on the Gates Foundation, you know, kind of its history and what it's been up to, but especially, you know, what it's been doing during the pandemic and what the response to the Gates Foundation's work has been during the pandemic. So I'm really excited to explore those issues with you because I think they will be really relevant to the listeners of this show who want to have a good idea of what Gates is up to. And so I wanted to start kind of generally by just asking you, you know, why did you want to look into the Gates Foundation and do this investigation? What

was your kind of kind of motivation to explore this further? Well, I feel like, you know, I started this, planning this out, this investigation out in 2019. And I just always understood the Gates Foundation to be this, you know, very powerful political entity that nobody regards as such. It's certainly not journalists do. There's been virtually no investigative reporting and very little critical reporting on the Gates Foundation kind of ever. So I just knew this was just wide open virgin territory. I knew there would be a lot there that hadn't been uncovered. So I just saw an opportunity to do it. I got a fellowship, an Alicia Patterson fellowship, which gave me a lot of 2019 to really dig deep into this investigation. So in a way, I feel like I've just scratched the surface. I mean, this is the foundation that's been totally under the radar from journalists, from government for more than a decade. So there's a lot more there I'm sure I haven't gotten to, but hopefully my reporting maybe encourages, inspires somebody else to take a look also.

Absolutely. You know, I think your work has definitely illustrated some key points about the Gates Foundation that is really important for people to understand when they think about its impact on the world and on global health and, you know, these other issues that it's involved with, right? So, you know, I did want to start by asking you about the media response to Gates and how he is treated, right? Because we know that, you know, back in the 90s, when he got into philanthropy, he was kind of a reviled figure in the press after the Microsoft antitrust suit, and everything that was going on there, right?

And then after two or almost three decades now of this philanthropic work, Gates is positioned as this figure that is kind of saving the world that we can turn to to get this kind of expert advice on these key challenges that the world is facing, more than $250 million to various different media groups and organizations over the years, and that there's been not only a lack of disclosure of that funding in some cases, but you think it's actually contributed to the way that that reporting is done. So the critical investigations into what's done on the Gates Foundation is not happening to the degree that it probably should. So I was hoping that you could kind of give us an idea of what you found when you looked at the media's response to Gates and how the Gates Foundation is covered, and whether you think that funding that Gates has been giving to media and obviously to many other organizations around the world

through the foundation over the years has affected the way that he gets covered and that the foundation gets covered. Yeah, I really like that introduction because what you've done is highlight that Bill Gates, he was like the original tech villain. The way you think about Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, that was Bill Gates back then. He was like the most reviled person in the world. And now he's like the most admired person. So he's this really remarkable, interesting, complicated, complex person. But in today's public eye, we've reduced him to this really simplistic character, this life- take Bill Gates at his word. They take the Gates Foundation at its word for what it is. It calls itself a charity. So we view it as a charity. We report on it as a philanthropy. That's something that even if it makes mistakes, it's always well-meaning.

It's indiscriminately giving money away. But I think that really bestates what the Gates Foundation is. I really think you have to look at it as a political organization because it's using its charitable dollars to influence public policy always. You know what I mean? They are one of the most powerful voices in global health. They're one of the most powerful voices in US education. They're shaping how we grow food in places like Africa. This isn't just a sort of benign influence that they're having. Bill Gates is calling up heads of states. So I think you have to view the Gates Foundation as a political entity, but you don't see that happening really in the news media. Well, really big picture, one of the things I did in my investigation was I looked at all 19,000 charitable grants the Gates Foundation has ever given away. And so you can find those in

their annual tax filings. That's one of the few transparency rules over private foundations. So that was a big analysis I did. And I've done a number of stories from that. But when I went through all 19,000 of these charitable grants, one thing I was looking for was the money they've given to the news media. And I tallied up more than $250 million. And this is going to a lot of news sites that your listeners probably go to, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, ProPublica. Not all that money is current. It's been over the decades they've given that money. And I think you have to understand that that may be one reason why the news media isn't more critical around the Gates Foundation because of that receipt of the funding. It's not the only explanation. It's

not the full explanation. But I think that absolutely does color the way that the news media does or doesn't report on the Gates Foundation. But the way I ended that piece is that the news media is always also just looking for a hero. And Bill Gates is so perfect for that role. He's a guy who made so much money. He's a really rich guy. And I think on some fundamental level, we worship wealth. And he's like the good billionaire. Other people have said this before, but he's somebody who's incredibly wealthy, but he's giving away all this wealth. That's not true if you look at the actual numbers of it, but that's the way he's perceived. So he's such an attractive figure to play that role of this hero. And it's a way to reconcile all of these. We've talked about the 1% and the 99% and the billionaire class. This is

like a growing sort of political discourse around this. But Bill Gates should be viewed as exhibit A of this problem of like this gross inequalities, but he's not. Not only is he not, but he's like held up by the news media as sort of a cherished example of the good that billionaires can do. And it's just kind of a very kind of myopic view of things. It's an uncomplicated and I would say unjournalistic view of what the Gates Foundation is and who Bill Gates is. Yeah, I think that's such a perfect way to describe it. I was talking to someone the other day about like this kind of distinction between good billionaires and bad billionaires and gave the same example of Gates. I was like, you know, he's held up as this good billionaire, but when you actually dig into what he's doing, he's not

a good billionaire at all, right? And, you know, before we move on to another topic, I wanted to point out like one of the things that I found most interesting in how you looked at the Gates Foundation and how the Gates Foundation is covered is how not only is it positioned in this really positive way, how you know, it's going around the world and solving these health challenges and other challenges. But not only is Gates treated as this kind of figure who knows everything, but you you mentioned how in a lot of these stories, and it won't be pointed mentioned how in a lot of these stories, and it won't be pointed out, but a lot of the people who are quoted are also funded by the Gates Foundation. And so you get this kind of really insular view that doesn't get any

viewpoints or few viewpoints that are actually outside of the whole kind of Gates circle of funding. And obviously, that influences how people are going to think about it and the kind of responses that you're going to get. Yeah. In the article I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review, I took a close look at NPR, which has taken, I can't remember, I think it's $17 million from the Gates Foundation, and they report on Gates a lot. And I was finding examples of their reporting where they are only quoting the Gates Foundation, Bill or Melinda Gates, or some group that is funded by the Gates. So, you know, I will say that if you're a journalist and you're writing about something like global health and something

that Gates is doing, you know, you do have to work a little bit harder to find somebody who isn't funded by Gates because Gates is funding everybody. You're talking about academics, think tanks, universities, But at the same time, there's still plenty of people not funded by Gates. And actually, to make this conversation a little more complicated, there are a lot of critics of the Gates Foundation. Their influence isn't absolute.

They don't touch every corner of the news media. I'm not funded by the Gates Foundation. They don't touch every corner of universities. There's a ton of people in social sciences. You're an academic, right? Yeah. Yeah, so. They don't get Gates Foundation of universities. There's a ton of people in social sciences. You're an academic, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't get Gates Foundation money.

Yeah, right. But the institution you're with probably does, right? Possibly. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, they've given $8 billion to universities. So I'd be surprised if, you know, where your school isn't. So, you know, you could always find these critical voices, but you have to take that

extra step as a journalist to reach out and find them and to be assiduously asking your sources, do you have ties to the Gates Foundation? One kind of argument that I want to disarm before we move forward. So we came to be connected because of a really viral tweet that I made about Bill Gates and his effect on making the Oxford University vaccine that I think we'll talk about making it not open source and giving the rights exclusively to AstraZeneca. And after that tweet, Bill Gates was asked about it in an interview with a science YouTube show. And the framing of the conversation was basically, look at this conspiracy theorist

who is saying that you are out here getting in the way of people's access to vaccines, right? The interview, they highlighted your tweet. Yeah. Really? Yeah. That's incredible. Wow. And so basically, I was framed as this conspiracy theorist, even though when Gates responded to the tweet, he said, yeah, like we were involved and we told

Oxford University to make a deal with a pharmaceutical company instead of open sourcing their vaccine. So it confirmed what I said in the tweet, even though I was framed as a conspiracy theorist. And I feel like it was in one of your articles that you mentioned how I think it was PolitiFact and USA Today have kind of used their fact-checking organizations to defend Gates from what they called false conspiracy theories and misinformation that were actually just critical journalism about kind of the work that the Gates Foundation is doing. So my question is, are you kind of worried about the response that is sometimes taken to critical journalism that is just kind of or just critical

views of what these organizations are doing that are not like some disingenuous kind of right wing argument just because it's getting in the way of whatever their view of the world might be or whatever QAnon thing or conspiracy theory they're believing in. But it's actually trying to unpack the problems that are coming of kind of the power and the use of this wealth. You know, but it's actually trying to unpack the problems that are coming of kind of the power and the use of this wealth. But it's like there's a line drawn between the critique and the disingenuous kind of right-wing conspiracy theory as if they're the same to kind of treat the criticism, the legitimate criticism, as if that can just be ignored in the same way as we ignore kind of the right-wing stuff that's going on. Yeah, this is such a good topic. I've

been trying to find somewhere where we'll publish something about this. But the way I frame it is, is Bill Gates the victim or the beneficiary of conspiracy theories? There have been probably hundreds, maybe thousands of articles written about Gates being the victim of conspiracy theories. And that, again, does so much to, in terms of the public opinion, it treats him as this kind of sacrosanct figure that he's too important to criticize. At the same time, like some of this, this media narrative itself, this Gates is victim news narrative itself, seems to be part of the same pathology driving conspiracy theories. It's advancing misinformation in a whole separate way. So in Columbia Journalism Review, I'm looking at

these fact checkers. USA Today has a fact checking site. PolitiFact, I think, is the other one that has a fact checking site that I look at. And they're talking about how there's these conspiracy theories and misinformation about how the Gates Foundation has investments in pharmaceutical companies working to develop solutions to the pandemic. And they present that as like, it's a totally false misinformation. It's a conspiracy theory. And in CJR just pointed out, well, you can look at their tax records and see that the Gates Foundation has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in pharmaceutical companies working to, you know, produce diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics to treat COVID. So, you know, in their strenuous efforts to defend Gates from any criticism, they're actually advancing misinformation into

the public discourse. You know, where is that story being told? You know, your story about being held up on this science program as promoting conspiracy theory, you know, I have to say that's the third story like this I've heard in like three weeks. So the Mayo and Guardian, I think it's in South Africa, they wrote an editorial about vaccine apartheid. You know, this idea that rich, wealthy white countries are getting priority access to vaccines while poor countries aren't. You know, one of the reasons they explore is that the prevailing market mechanisms around vaccines, the big pharma is going to go to the highest bidder. They're going to be doing these advanced contracts with the United States, Canada, Europe, and that leaves poor countries really out on a

limb. One of the solutions everyone's talking about is why don't we scale up manufacturing? Why don't we release the technology? Why don't we waive the intellectual property and share the blueprints and the vaccine technology and get manufacturing facilities up and running all over the world? And I think the Associated Press did a story recently where they found, I'm sure they didn't do an exhaustive search, but they found three manufacturing facilities in places like Bangladesh, I think, that are like ready to go. I mean, they could be retrofitted to start producing the vaccine, but they don't have the rights to do so. So in this editorial, they actually got a line to Bill Gates. They're emailing with Bill Gates, and Bill Gates says, this is really a non-issue. There aren't manufacturing facilities available that

could be doing this. And this newspaper ended up criticizing him as essentially being part and parcel of the problem of vaccine apartheid. They tweeted this out and they were kicked off of Twitter. Yeah, they were kicked off of Twitter or the tweet was deleted. It was some form of censorship. And again, it's just so obvious whatever the robots are at Twitter that are checking for like conspiracy theory, if you criticize Gates, that's going to be a red flag, I guess, that

they're looking for. It's almost been reduced to that. So they got that fixed, like a day later, it got fixed and the tweet is back up. But somebody I know last week retweeted it. And then he got kicked off of Twitter for like a 12 hour ban. So, you know, I don't want to overstate things. I've never been throttled, you know, and I tweet a lot about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. But it just speaks to the kind of problem you're talking about where criticism of Bill Gates is being conflated as conspiracy around Bill Gates. And, you know, I've had enormous difficulty getting news outlets and publishers to take my reporting that's critical of Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation. It could be because some of them take funding from the Gates Foundation. It could be because this issue is seen as controversial. Like, do we want to put

up criticism of the Gates Foundation when there's so much conspiracy? An editor or publisher might just find it's easier not to deal with this issue. But I think it really is this kind of unhinged kind of Gates's victim narrative is really hurting the public discourse around Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation during the pandemic. I completely agree. And I think it's even worrying beyond Gates, you know, as we've seen during this pandemic, the wealth of all these billionaires has increased so enormously. And obviously, we know that there are more billionaires looking to kind of move into this kind of philanthropy. And so, you know, I think part of the worry, and I think it's justified worry, is that if Gates is being treated in this way, where criticism is conflated with conspiracy, then criticism of these other

billionaires could be seen in the same way at some point, if they kind of go down this similar road of kind of repackaging and rebranding themselves through philanthropy. So that's one thing that I'm worried about when it comes to this. Oh, yeah. I mean, Gates has created this new model. I don't know if it's a new model. I mean, I guess it's been done before, but it's like the contemporary model of this former

tech villain now kind of life-saving saint through philanthropy. I mean, we'll see Bezos just kind of step down from Amazon. We'll see, you know kind of step down from Amazon. We'll see, you know, what he has in store. He's already given away a lot of money, but he definitely hasn't shed his sort of tech villain residue yet. Bill Gates in his first years of philanthropy, journalists were not cynical, but I think skeptical, appropriately skeptical of his motives and what he was doing. I think there's a far more robust sort of journalism about Gates and philanthropy in 2000, even through the 2000s toward 2010. It's really in the last decade that it's disappeared, that kind of critical lens on Gates. So I want to move on to more aspects of

your reporting. And, you know, obviously, you just mentioned how Gates and the Gates Foundation have a lot of investments, right? A lot of investments in health companies and other types of companies that do the same kind of work that Gates and the Foundation are promoting around the world. And so Gates, in his approach to philanthropy, has this kind of preference for private solutions. He wrote that his philanthropy can be seen as a new model of charity in which the most direct beneficiaries are sometimes not the world's poor, but the world's wealthiest. Because, you know, he has this desire to promote the work of private companies, to promote intellectual property

and strong patent rights on vaccines and other treatments. That actually has negative impacts on the access to the people that he's claiming to help. So I'm wondering, what is the risk when it comes to what Gates is doing with both how he thinks that these problems should be solved through the work of private companies, and then is also invested in many of those companies and could potentially see returns on the various solutions that he's trying to push on the various countries around the world where the foundation is operating. Yeah, I mean, as a journalist, a lot of my research focuses on this idea of a financial conflict of interest, where, you know,

if you are in a position of public facing interest, public trust, if you're a lawyer, if you're a doctor, if you're a judge, if you're a scientist, and you're supposed to be acting in an independent, maybe not objective, but an independent way, at the same time that you have an outside financial interest that could bias your ability to act independently, that kind of financial conflict of interest. And it's something that you have to look at with the Gates Foundation because it has so much money. It's a $50 billion foundation. And when I was looking through all of its charitable grants over the years, 19,000 charitable grants, you keep seeing all these donations to

private companies, especially a lot of big pharma companies, which in and of itself is kind of crazy. You know, this is a charity. Bill and Melinda Gates are getting huge tax benefits for making these donations. But more than that, they're getting this political capital they're building up as these kind of people who can influence public policy as philanthropists. But why are we allowing them to make charitable donations to private companies? But then there's like another quirk to it is that they've made donations to private companies in which the Gates Foundation endowment, the $50 billion pot of money that it sits on, that its endowment itself has invested in.

So they're giving money to companies and that puts them in a position to stand to benefit from those charitable donations. So it's a really striking financial conflicts of interest that you see. But even when you don't have that kind of direct financial conflict of interest, as you know, yeah, I mean, Gates, like a prevailing sort of wisdom in his worldview or wisdom in his charitable grant making is around leaning on private sector solutions. So this could be private companies, but it could also just be NGOs that the Gates Foundation funds or even that the Gates Foundation creates. And what that does is it gives the foundation some control over the levers of public policy. If you have, you know, all of these NGOs that are pushing Gates' agenda,

it really gives them a lot of political capital in what they're doing. But, you know, I just brought this up, but just to kind of, this is such the most obvious contemporary example about this vaccine apartheid issue. You know, there is a petition right now from many countries around the world that are calling on the World Trade Organization to waive the intellectual property rights surrounding COVID vaccines, COVID therapeutics. Again, the idea is we should get as many manufacturing facilities that could possibly start scaling up production of these treatments, these vaccines, we should get them into production. But we can't do that until the Pfizer's of the world say, here's the blueprints, here's the vaccine technology, here's exactly how

you do it. And there's a lot of people are saying, why wouldn't you just give this information away? I mean, taxpayers funded these pharmaceutical companies to produce this. We're in a pandemic, you know what I mean? Why wouldn't you just want to like create the biggest production possible in the most efficient way possible rather than keeping everything behind Pfizer and AstraZeneca? But what that does is that really challenges the prevailing market mechanisms governing the pharmaceutical industry and all their profit centers. But it also challenges the way that Bill Gates thinks, and this tracks back to his days at Microsoft, which was a software company who very much like the pharmaceutical

industry, its profits and its products were really wrapped up into strong intellectual property protections. So even beyond this idea of Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation having a financial interest, I think you do have to look at that, a financial interest in intellectual property and this patent system and private business. It's also just an ideological or political position that Bill Gates brings to the marketplace of ideas. And it's something that he wouldn't argue with. There's times and places where Bill Gates describes his contributions to humanity and talks about having helped usher in the computer revolution through his work with Microsoft as on par or maybe even more important than all of the lives he saved at the Gates Foundation. And so that kind of gives you a sense, like in his mind, that private sector background

that he has, he really sees as a tool for social progress. The computer revolution, it opened up minds, it gave people tools they needed to advance society. He sees Microsoft in some important ways itself as some kind of philanthropic humanitarian effort. It's really striking. To really pull back, what's at issue here is that Bill Gates isn't like you or I. He is this enormously powerful individual. Every year, Forbes, for what it's worth, they list Bill Gates as one of the 10 most powerful people in the world. I actually agree with that. I mean, he's certainly one of the most powerful people in the world.

In the power, the political power he wields in a lot of ways, it is about advancing that ideological or political position around market-based mechanisms, around strong intellectual property. And it's a kind of power that you or I don't have. And it's a kind of power that normally, you would think the most political, powerful people in the world would be somebody who'd be subject to all sorts of checks and balances, like the electorate by government rules and regulations. But Gates has carved out this weird place as a philanthropist, as through a private foundation. I don't think it's wrong to compare it to like lobbying or campaign contributions. It's a way that the super rich can influence public policy, but we don't treat it the same way in terms of checks, balances, regulations. I think that's a fantastic way to describe it. And I think you're

spot on. As you were describing the power of Gates and the Gates Foundation in this way to kind of influence public policy on top of what it does with presenting various solutions around the world and being able to push their idea of how these solutions should work because it comes in with so much money. It reminded me of this interview that Thomas Piketty gave to the BBC in 2015, where he's asked, like, why are these massive billionaires foundations a problem, right? Because, you know, they're doing all these good things in the world, they're funding all these projects. And Piketty basically says, like, you know, if you want to give, if you want to call this philanthropic giving, you know, I think it's important that you don't keep control.

Bill Gates, not philanthropy, the Gates Foundation Foundation trying to cure polio, malaria? I think it would be much more convincing if he gave away power. If you keep control right, this is the best situation you can think of as a billionaire. Because when you're a billionaire, you cannot spend it all just on your food or clothes, so you have to do something. Isn't it the best situation that the entire planet is going to come and ask you, oh, Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Bill Gates, would you like to finance this health program, this education program? So I can see why for them this is the best possible situation.

Now, in terms of organizing an health system, an efficient health system, an efficient education system, the interesting question is what works. And the interesting question is what has worked historically un système de santé et d'éducation efficace. La question intéressante est ce qui fonctionne. Et la question intéressante est ce qui a fonctionné historiquement, pour augmenter la littératie, pour augmenter l'attente de vie. Est-ce que c'est le fait d'avoir un système de santé, une FNC organisée par des milliardaires,

ou est-ce que c'est le fait d'avoir un système de santé et un système d'éducation organisé par des collectifs, vous savez, le gouvernement et les élections? Et vous savez, je pense que nous sommes très naïfs organized by some collective government and elections. I think we are being very naive about the idea that now we don't need taxation, we don't need the government, we just need to wait for billionaires to give some of their wealth. So I think philanthropy is fine, again it's very useful as long as it comes in addition to taxation.

If it comes instead of taxation, and if you have people who don't pay tax, like Facebook basically pays no tax, and then you say, well, it's not a problem if I don't pay tax because I will set up my own health system, my own education system, and you will see it will work very well. I think this is the end of democracy. That is one thing that really came to mind as you were describing that the power that this gives these individuals, because they have so much money, especially at a time where the taxes of governments have been cut for several decades, and they've cut services for many decades and constantly say that there's not money to fund new programs. But then you have these billionaires with all this money to give out. And so naturally, people are going to

them and being like, can you fund my journalism? Can you fund my research program? Can you fund my NGO, whatever? And that gives them a lot of power over what's actually happening. Yeah, I mean, the Gates Foundation shows up with a suitcase full of cash, and everybody stops what they're doing and looks and lines up. That does not exclude the news media, which is just hemorrhaging money, right? Everybody needs money. And there's, you know, a lot of easy ways to rationalize taking Gates' money because it's philanthropy, it's charity, it's innocent, it's not political. But I think that's like a kind of a mirage. And I think it's kind of dangerous. I mean, the thoughtful scholars, even like people who are big fans of philanthropy, like the learned scholars will acknowledge

that philanthropy is undemocratic. It's a way for wealthy people to gain influence and power in ways that aren't subject to checks and balances. So I think that's like really a starting point because even the people who are supporters and apologists and defenders for big philanthropy have to acknowledge that point that it is undemocratic. And yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. Bill Gates donates all this money to a foundation called the Gates Foundation that he and Melinda Gates run. And then they give it to NGOs that align with their worldview of how the world should work, or they just create new NGOs that do that. And then they micromanage the NGOs to make sure that they get the results that they want. All of this gives can give the illusion that there's all of these different groups that have kind of independently come up with the same idea

about the way the world should work. And I'm not saying it all goes back to the Gates Foundation, but there is a worry, like you mentioned, if there's going to be a new class of tech villains who follow in Bill Gates' footsteps. But I mean, if you have these incredibly, incredibly rich billionaires who follow in Bill Gates' footsteps, I think you're going to see that threat to democracy becomes even greater. If there's suddenly 10 Bill Gates out there, then the influence is really magnified in striking ways. Absolutely. And I want to return to what you said about the vaccine apartheid issue, right? Because I think one of these big stories that kind of really illustrates not only Gates' impact on the pandemic, but I think,

you know, what he's been doing in health before that, that has been not ignored, but I don't think there's been as much attention paid to it than there probably should have, right? As you say, like the critical voices are there, but they don't always get the same kind of attention that the voices who are in favor of the Gates Foundation would receive. And that's obviously the situation with Oxford University and AstraZeneca. So Oxford University developed this COVID vaccine, which is one of the ones that is the main vaccines being used around the world right now. And their original plan, they say, or they said, was to open source this

vaccine so anyone who had the capabilities would be able to produce it. But the Gates Foundation gives a lot of money to Oxford University and in particular to this kind of health group that created the vaccine. And they stepped in and said, no, you need to work with a pharmaceutical partner. You need to sign up with someone. And AstraZeneca was the company that they, you know, chose to sign and give exclusive rights to this vaccine to. So then it wasn't that anyone in the world who had the capabilities could produce the vaccine. But now it was AstraZeneca who could produce it and anyone who signed contracts with AstraZeneca. And so I was wondering if you could kind of talk about this situation and what that

suggests about what Gates' impact on this pandemic has been, even as he's been lauded and treated as the expert, I think, by a lot of media when it comes to coverage of the pandemic and vaccine responses and things like that. Yeah, I mean, the Oxford AstraZeneca example is interesting because of what came next. The way I understand it is that Gates' view was that Oxford, this university, it didn't have the wherewithal, the institutional knowledge to bring such an important vaccine quickly to the marketplace to go through all the regulatory hurdles. So you've got to team up with big pharma, somebody who's done this before, somebody who knows how to do this to get things done. But what's interesting is what followed is there was this huge controversy because they bungled the clinical trials. AstraZeneca and Oxford, they did something

in the clinical trials where at the end of the day, it's still not approved in the United States, right? I don't think so. Yeah. So, and I think part of the reason is because of what happened with their clinical trial, something got messed up. And so it sort of makes you wonder, it's like, hmm, do they really need to go with AstraZeneca? I mean, who knows what the responsible party was in that case. But to me, it just seems like if the idea really was that they needed to team up with pharmaceutical industry to have the expertise to bring it to market, and that's the only way this works, why did you see these headlines and these controversies and these scandals involving the problems that ensued?

In the article I wrote for The Nation about that, what was interesting is that a transcript of the interview that Bill Gates did with the press where he was talking about how he went to Oxford and told them they needed to team up with Big Pharma. I quoted the rest of the transcript in there because in it, Bill Gates, he just sort of lapses into this storytelling as though he himself is in charge of the pandemic response. He's talking about how he's talking to all the pharmaceutical companies directly about what's going on with phase two, phase three trials. He's talking to heads of countries. And it really does feel like what a lot of people think is that he plays this incredibly outsized role in the pandemic. Where you really see it beyond brokering these kinds

of deals with Oxford and AstraZeneca is at the World Health Organization. So the World Health Organization has, they're trying to find a way to deal with these gross inequities around things like vaccine apartheid, these poor countries who can't just readily enter into the marketplace and compete with the highest bidders from the United States. So the Gates Foundation has been involved kind of like with every aspect of what the World Health Organization is doing, to the extent that a lot of people feel the World Health Organization has really been sidelined, and that the Gates Foundation is really in charge. That's what a lot of people are saying,

you know, and they're saying it's because, and there's probably some truth to this, that the Gates Foundation at this point has expertise in global health that the World Health Organization doesn't. That the Gates Foundation has become kind of what we expect the World Health Organization to be. it being sort of the center of the universe for global health and how we deal with these problems. But that's a democratic problem in and of itself. The World Health Organization, I'm sure it has huge, very serious problems, but there's at least some semblance of a democratic process there. You have member states, you have a governing body, you have rules and regulations, you know, versus the Gates

Foundation, where those kinds of checks and balances and governance doesn't really exist. You know, I think that's also illustrated in your reporting when you talked about, I can't remember the name of it right now, but the kind of organization that collects all this health data that the Gates Foundation established at, I think it was the University of Washington, that has come to kind of rival the World Health Organization as kind of the key place where you go for your health metrics. But you described how it's really difficult to know where kind of all that data is coming from, and it's not very transparent how it's all kind of calculated and put together, and even kind of gives this notion that we already kind of understand and

can see everything that's going on around the world. And in certain places, the kind of recording and collecting of that data doesn't need to be improved because, you know, look, it's all here in this kind of program, website, whatever. Can you describe a bit about how that was kind of created and what the concerns, I guess, about that are for global health data. Yeah. So for years, the World Health Organization was kind of de facto in charge. It had the biggest program of what you could call global health metrics. This is so hard to write this piece, Paris, just because it's like, you can't just talk about the money and politics surrounding AIDS. You have to explain what health metrics are. So in the United States, we have like the CDC, which collects really good data about births, about deaths, about why people are dying, where people are dying,

really sophisticated bureaucracy that collects all this data. In poor countries, that doesn't exist. So if we don't know where people are dying or why, it's hard to prioritize what the public health problems are, for example, and where do we need to address them and how should we prioritize government policy and international aid. So the World Health Organization historically had done that. And they'd worked with countries and whatever capacity they had to publish these long reports that looked at what's going on with global health. A number of years ago, sorry, I guess it's about 10 years ago, the Gates Foundation created this kind of rival institution. It's called the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle, which is where the Gates Foundation

is located. And they've given it more than $600 million, I think, which is just an unheard of sum of money for an academic research institution. It's allowed the IHME not just to rival the WHO, but to really surpass it and overwhelm it in some important ways. And so now the gold standard where you want to know what's happening in global health, you go to the IHME. But the IHME is fundamentally a product of the Gates Foundation. And so people describe the IHME as a monopoly and a juggernaut. And these are words that really resonate around someone like Bill Gates. But it all goes back to this issue of power. And it gives the Gates Foundation an enormous amount of influence over how you understand global health, how you prioritize the problems in global health, and also the solutions, because what it'll do is it'll look at the data and how the data changes over time to sort of measure how different interventions have succeeded or failed. And so, you know, you're finding, you know, science that's being published based on IHME data that's

measuring how effective Gates Foundation's public health work was. So it becomes very circular in a way that, yeah, absolutely, it highlights the outsized influence that the Gates Foundation has in global health. And what made this story more relevant when I wrote it in December is that the IHME has put its huge data capacity towards COVID projections. There's all these different research institutes that are trying to project whether COVID is going to be getting better or worse in the weeks and months ahead, as we do different policy procedures, lockdowns, masks, so on and so forth. And that becomes really important to planning, do we have enough

hospital bed capacity? Do we have enough ventilators? You need those projections. But the IHME has really asserted itself, because it has so much money, I didn't really get to this in the article, but what a lot of sources told me is it gives them like a dedicated media office that other researchers don't have. And that allows them to push their findings ahead of everyone else into the news media. And they're everywhere in the news media and they've really dominated the news media, even as they've had some colossal mistakes in their projections. And that gets back to the real problem that a lot of scholars are citing with the IHME is that it's become too big to peer review. It has so much money and so much resources, it's no longer accountable in a way that science should

be, is what its critics say. Critics call it like a black box. They're using really high-tech, sophisticated data modeling to come up with numbers and estimates to describe global health. But people are saying it's happening in a way that it's not even subject to really rigorous peer review, even in places like the Lancet. And this kind of gets, not to get off of too many topics, but a kind of issue of decolonizing global health. A lot of people say, why don't we invest our money into building up the capacity in developing nations so they can do their own data collection? So we don't have to create these sophisticated highfalutin estimates in Seattle that describe what's

happening in sub-Saharan Africa. The estimates that we're producing in Seattle that we can't really effectively peer review scholars are saying, you know? I mean, you need health metrics. Everybody says that, that's obvious. But there's, you know, a way in which, you know, science like politics, like philanthropy, it should be accountable. There should be checks and balances in place. If I'm properly understanding what you're describing, it seems like kind of using, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of data going in here. And it's kind of like using big data models to kind of figure out what is going on with global health in these parts of the world that don't have the same kind of recording capacity that we see in, say, the

United States or Canada, instead of actually building out what we would need on the ground, the kind of public institutions to do that recording. Would that be a good way of understanding how you see what's going on? Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for filling in that gap. I didn't explain that well. It definitely is this big data approach. Instead of actually collecting the data of how many births and deaths there are and why people are dying and getting a death certificate, the most critical voices are saying they're just making up data. I mean, to be fair, what they're doing is educated guesses. They're trying to collect the best available data. If you don't have data in this province or this country, you go to a similar province or country and use that data and whatever other data you can get and you put it into a complicated

modeling. And at the end of the day, you say that you have the best because you have the most data, more data than everybody else. You have the best model. Nevermind that people are saying they can't check what you're doing, that it's like a black box. So this definitely gets into the kind of big data criticism that I think is more the kind of research and work that you do, Paris. Absolutely. That's what it seems like. So I just wanted to clarify it. Absolutely. You know, I think it's really worrying what you're pointing out there. You know, I think a number of the things that you have pointed out throughout this conversation are reason to worry about kind of the impacts that Gates is having on global health and

other issues that he is involved in, right? I think another one that would really resonate for people in the United States and, you know, other Western countries as well is that Gates has been one of the biggest pushers of the privatization of education. You know, in Africa, the education initiatives that he's pushed are also focused around, you know, private schooling instead of enhancing the public system. But in the United States, he's been a big supporter of charter schools. And even, I believe he funded this documentary, Waiting for Superman, that kind of positioned the public education system as kind of not up to the task and kind of making the case for the private system,

as I recall it. What is Gates doing in education? And what is the worry of that? Because I believe other billionaires are kind of following him down this path of promoting charter schools over the public education system. Yeah, I don't know if it's following or leading. I mean, there certainly seem to be, you know, working fairly closely in lockstep. But this is an interesting case where the Gates Foundation is working in the United States. Like you said, this is kind of a US example. But it's also they're working with like the Koch brothers, their agendas on US education are pretty similar. There's been so many books written about the Koch brothers and so much critical reporting. Somehow, like the Koch brothers are fair game to put a critical lens on it every turn in

the news media. But Bill Gates, you can't do that. Even though they're working in similar ways, this idea of like dark money and using their money to influence politics. So really the same thing is happening in education. Generally speaking, yes, that's the agenda is, I think, moving towards privatization, kind of writ large, in things like charter schools, which are privately managed or privately administered public schools. The education piece, to some degree, has gotten a decent amount of

coverage. I will say that Gates Foundation has taken some knocks, and they've even had to acknowledge some high profile failures in some of the work that they've done. You've also seen a really interesting revolving door during the Barack Obama administration. You saw just a kind of a seamless sort of revolving door of like personnel, but also just ideas between the Department of Education or Obama and the Gates Foundation. And you're starting to see that also with the Biden administration, which is kind of interesting. But bigger picture, I haven't taken on the education piece in my own reporting. That is something that I haven't really taken a really close look at. So because I'm constantly raising questions on Twitter about why everyone asked Bill Gates to be an expert on economics,

the stimulus, climate change, things he really is not an expert on. I'm going to say that I probably shouldn't weigh in on Gates and education because I haven't, as a reporter, really tackled that issue yet. I think that's completely fair. But I still think you gave us a pretty good overview of what's going on there. And I think your point about the Koch brothers is so interesting, right? How they're kind of fair game for criticism, even across the mainstream media, what they're doing. But when it comes to Gates, he is kind of held up as this figure that we should all be trusting and looking to for the solutions to these global problems. So I think that's fascinating. So you've given us so many important things to think about in this interview about

kind of the impact of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation on private solutions to these global problems, on the way that the foundation is invested in many of the same solutions that it's pushing on various parts of the world, and what Gates's response to the pandemic has been and why there are questions about that. But obviously there are so many more topics that we could get to with the Gates Foundation. I wanted to end by asking, is there anything with regard to Gates and the Gates Foundation that we haven't gotten to that you think is important for the listeners to understand and to think about when they look at the Gates Foundation and what kind of impact that it's having? I mean, to me, an issue that I always come back with, as I've tried to do my reporting on Gates, is like this issue of transparency. So, you know,

I've been reporting on them for more than a year, and I've never gotten a single interview with anyone at the Gates Foundation. I've asked to interview Bill Gates, but I've also asked to any program officer anywhere in the foundation. I have so many questions. Let's have a conversation. And it's so unbelievable how resistant they are to, I think, get into an interview that they can't control with somebody who's going to ask critical questions and put them in a tough spot. So Gates is in the media all the time doing interviews. But how often is any, you know, or anyone asking really critical questions or asking questions and really pushing Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation to answer them? And for a philanthropy that talks a really big game about transparency, you know, they talk all these stories of Gates being the victim of a conspiracy theory says, well, we fight conspiracy

theories with radical transparency. No, you don't. Answer the questions that I send. I've sent like probably at this point, hundreds of questions to the Gates Foundation because you have to communicate with them by email. You can't have a phone conversation. And you'll get, you know, one-tenth of them will get a response, by which I mean a non-response. And these are some like just basic factual questions even that you won't get an answer to. So, I mean, the level of engagement, you know, not that that is a solution to continue to have, I mean, the level of engagement, you know, not that that is a solution to continue to have, you know, the Gates Foundation do what it's doing in an undemocratic way without checks and balance, but being more transparent. That's not a solution, but it's just

so striking to me as a reporter, how resistant they've been to be transparent. Really the only other serious in-depth investigative journalistic investigation into the Gates Foundation was by the LA Times in 2007, I think. And I spoke to the reporter who did that series. And what he told me was that he had to publish multiple articles about the Gates Foundation before they would talk to him. Because they had, they just sort of hoping that this would go quietly into the night. And once they realized it wasn't going away, they finally did talk to them. And he said, you know, that's how governments operate. That's how big corporations operate. You just hope that this goes away until you can no longer ignore it. So I don't know if Bill Gates counts himself among the listeners of your podcast, Paris, but if he's listening, I would love to have a conversation, you know, just let's talk.

I don't think I'll be able to help you with that one. But, you know, I think that's so right. You know, just let's talk. I don't think I'll be able to help you with that one. But, you know, I think that's so right. You know, like even in your reporting, you described how like Gates published this article in, I think it was an academic journal. And when it came to conflicts, he just wrote like that he had a lot of conflicts and didn't outline them and how difficult it's been for you, like beyond the kind of tax filings, to get information about the various investments and things that Gates and the foundation have been involved in to check whether there are these conflicts. So it does seem that that issue with transparency is a big one. Yeah. And it goes down to this issue of dark money also. When I was tracking the money that they're giving to the news media, I can track the charitable grants,

which they report, but not contracts, which are a very serious, significant sum of money. So I know that the Gates Foundation money is contracting money. They're contracting with news media outlets, but I don't know who, I don't know how much money, and they won't tell me. To know who the Gates Foundation is funding the news media is really important for consumers, for readers, and for democracy, for as important a role as the Fourth Estate's plays in checks and balances. It's really important for the Gates Foundation to be clear about which news media outlets it's contracting with. And it won't do that. I mean, again, these examples just pile up. They really are at odds with the sort of public brand

of the foundation as this, you know, public interest, philanthropy, promoting equity, transparency. There's just not enough information there. So that's where the investigative journalism comes in. Absolutely. And, you know, I think your pieces have been really illustrative of what's going on here and have been really fascinating for me to read and find out more about what the Gates Foundation has been involved in. So, you know, I really appreciate you doing that work. And I really thank you for taking the time to come on the podcast and chat about it with me. Yeah, thanks so much, Paris. This has been great. Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose recent work on the Gates Foundation has been published by The Nation, the Columbia Review of

Journalism and the British Medical Journal. You can follow Tim on Twitter at Timothy W. Schwab. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, please consider becoming a monthly supporter by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us. Thanks for listening. Thank you.