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The rest of this post comes from a Press Release from The Nation. There are three articles in the links below but fortunately if you are not a Nation subscriber you can have three free articles. I think you will agree when you have finished reading them that this is a very worthwhile use of your time. And, if you have not been paying attention, go read Cory Doctorow’s latest on his blog

The Nation’s Tim Schwab—whose incisive three-part investigation into the Gates Foundation won a 2021 Izzy Award for independent media—is out with a new deep dive into Bill Gates’s opposition to patent waivers on Covid vaccines: A stance that isn’t just ideological, but could be linked to the Gates Foundation’s co-ownership of a vaccine company—and likely a vast trove of intellectual property:

Is the Shine Starting to Come Off Bill Gates’s Halo?

The billionaire’s role in perpetuating vaccine apartheid in the name of protecting intellectual property rights has begun to draw criticism.

Amid a growing chorus of criticism for Bill Gates’s role in the unfolding vaccine apartheid around the world, Schwab reports that many have understated the full scope of the Gates Foundation’s interests in this debate—including the sprawling array of intellectual property the charity has acquired access to through its grants and investments. And the fact that the foundation co-owns a vaccine company. It is increasingly urgent to ask if Gates’s multiple roles in the pandemic—as a charity, a business, an investor, and a lobbyist—are about philanthropy and giving away money, or about taking control and exercising power—monopoly power.

ABOUT: Tim Schwab (@TimothyWSchwab) is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., whose sweeping three-part Nation investigation into The Gates Foundation was part of a 2019 Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship.

The first installment uncovered the historically opaque operation’s two billion dollars in ‘charitable’ donations to private businesses, documenting how their endowment generates far more income than it gives away. The second part unearthed the foundation’s hundreds of millions invested in companies working on Covid-19, putting it in a position to generate windfall revenues, which Gates himself has failed to disclose publicly. The third piece offered damning criticism of the foundation’s highest-profile research project, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which holds near-monopoly power over global/public health. It exposed a welter of financial conflicts of interest and other irregularities at The Lancet, a leading journal that publishes much of IHME’s work.

Representingthe first substantive investigation into the Gates Foundation in 15 years, Schwab provided readers with a singular narrative about how the super-rich transform money into power and wield a devastatingly undemocratic hold over public policy.

Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.