The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: Quid Pro Quo and the New England Journal of Medicine

In part one of this two part series, I looked at the connection between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Clinton family and their foundations.  In part two, I will examine the relationship between the Gates family and the New England Journal of Medicine and its Editors-in-Chief.

Let's open this posting with a translation.  In the title of this posting, I used the Latin words "quid pro quo".  Three years of high school Latin (I can't tell you why) tells me that the word-for-word translation is "this for that".  Merriam-Webster defines it as "something given or received for something else" the basis for this posting.

The New England Journal of Medicine or NEJM is one of the world's foremost peer-reviewed medical publications and is published by the Massachusetts Medical Society.  It is the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world and touts its peer-reviewed articles as "the highest quality evidence that advances medical science and improves patient care".

Under the NEJM's Author Center webpage, you will find this:

Under the NEJM's Author Center/New Manuscripts webpage, you will find this:

Under the NEJM's Editorial Policies, you will find this:

According to the NEJM, they receive more than 16,000 research and other submissions for consideration for publication every year with only five percent achieving publication. 

Now, while it may not surprise you and given the vast number of researchers seeking to have their research made public for the good of the medical profession and their patients, once again, Bill Gates, the world's foremost self-educated epidemiologist and chief promoter of a global vaccination program for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has made another appearance in the New England Journal of Medicine as shown here in a "Perspective" entitled "Responding to Covid-19 - A Once-in-a-Century Pandemic?": 

This is not Bill Gates' first appearance in the rigorously peer-reviewed NEJM.  He also had "Perspectives" published in April 2015, May 2018  and gave the 128th Annual Shattuck Lecture for the New England Journal of Medicine and the Massachusetts Medical Society in April 2018 as shown here:

In case you care, here is a complete transcript of Bill Gates' 2018 speech which contained many references to influenza and vaccines.

So, in light of the most recent of Gates' musings to appear in the NEJM, one must ask the question; why would the world's foremost medical journal care what an amateur, untrained "epidemiologist" would have to say about any health-related issue.  I think that I may have found at least part of the answer.

Here is an announcement dated June 19, 2019 from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, announcing the appointment of the Chair of the Chan School of Public Health's Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases as the Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine:

Dr. Eric Rubin is a "recognized and respected leader in the field of infectious disease, where he is known for his groundbreaking tuberculosis research."

Now, let's look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's searchable grantee database.  According to my search, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health received the following grants:

Since 2010, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has received grants totalling $104,278,804 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its predecessors.  Given Dr. Rubin's specialty in tuberculosis research, here are two grants that you might find interesting:

The previous Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine from 2000 to 2019 was Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, a senior physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and is also a Professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the very same Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.  Here is a listing of the grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Inc.:

In total, Brigham and Women's Hospital has received $28,418,907 from the Gates' family foundation since prior to 2009.

While we cannot assume that both the current and past Editors-in-Chief of the world's most prestigious medical journal received direct funding from the foundation funded by Bill Gates' massive fortune, at the very least, we can see that it could be deemed unwise to "bite the hand" that is feeding significant funding to the organizations employing Dr. Eric Rubin and Dr. Jeffrey Drazen.  Refusing to publish Bill Gates' musings about the COVID-19 pandemic could easily be seen as a "career limiting move" when it comes to funding future research.

Remember this from the beginning of this posting?

One can't help but question the potential bias given the donations made by the Gates family foundation to the very medical researchers who are tasked with the job of deciding which submissions make the NEJM's final approval.  Oh, what a tangled web.

As you can see from the data that I have presented in this two part series, funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation forms a very important role in global medical research.  These donations have led to a "quid pro quo" situation in which the medical establishment could be seen to be indebted to its donor master rather than being independent, a factor that goes a long way to explaining why health authorities around the world are lining up behind the recommendation for a mass vaccination program to protect the human race from the SARS-CoV-2 virus.