Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates sought to profit from — and exert influence over — scientific publishing and online discourse, according to information in the “Epstein Files” released last month by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a series of posts on X, ScienceGuardians revealed that Epstein, Gates and figures linked to the Gates Foundation were instrumental in financing ResearchGate, an online scientific research portal.
The Epstein Files contain a “fund summary” published in 2014 by Biosys Capital Partners. The report lists companies “at the intersection of medicine, life sciences and digital technology” that it considered attractive investment targets.
The summary listed ResearchGate, noting that Gates provided $10 million in funding to ResearchGate in 2013. This was part of a Gates-led funding round that attracted $35 million in investments to ResearchGate.
The fund summary stated that ResearchGate aimed to “connect searchers and scientists … to share, discover, use, and distribute findings.”
But according to ScienceGuardians, the platform was actually developed “as a for-profit business to make big money from science” — with the intent to “control the flow of scientific ideas” and exert influence over scientific discourse...
Gates, Epstein helped attract Big Pharma, key journals to ResearchGate
Gates and Epstein helped attract investors and advertisers — including Big Pharma — to ResearchGate, promising healthy returns.
The 2014 Biosys fund summary lists the firm’s managing partner as Boris Nikolic, Gates’ chief science and technology adviser. Included in the Epstein Files is an August 2013 agreement between Gates and Epstein, in which Gates requested that Epstein “personally serve” as Nikolic’s representative.
According to a September 2013 document, Nikolic stood to gain between $2.5 and $100 million — contingent on how much ResearchGate’s value increased. This created “huge motivation” to hype up ResearchGate, ScienceGuardians wrote.
In 2017, Gates participated in a new funding round for ResearchGate that garnered $52.6 million in investments.
Investors included Goldman Sachs and the Wellcome Trust, led by Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D., architect of key COVID-19 pandemic-era policies and now assistant director-general of the World Health Organization...
Gates and Epstein also helped secure partnerships with the publishers of major scientific journals, including Nature. Published by Springer Nature, it is widely considered one of the “giants” of medical and scientific publishing.
Other Springer publications include Politico, Springer Health, Nature, BioMedCentral, Scientific American and Nature Medicine — publisher of the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper in 2020, used to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin.
“Proximal Origin” was used to discredit proponents of the “lab-leak” theory of COVID-19’s origin. Government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and mainstream media outlets widely cited the paper, which has not been retracted.
Last year, the Trump administration launched an investigation against Nature Medicine’s publisher, examining whether the journal allowed Fauci and other public health officials to influence the paper’s conclusions in exchange for funding.
‘When we needed them the most, free-thinking scientists were scarce’
According to ScienceGuardians, traditional scientific publishers initially opposed ResearchGate’s influence — before opting to collaborate with the platform...
“Why would billionaires like Gates & Epstein crave this kind of power? Owning a hub like ResearchGate lets them shape what research explodes into the spotlight — and what quietly fades away,” ScienceGuardians wrote.
Mead agreed. “The most insidious direct impact on this exposure aspect could be on algorithmic choices … what gets recommended or highlighted — that is, which fields or topics gain more online visibility without suppressing others outright. It’s a subtle form of narrative control.”
Peer-reviewed research published in 2022 found that researchers faced “a wide variety of censorship and suppression tactics during the COVID-19 pandemic, “due to their critical and unorthodox positions on COVID-19.” These tactics included “retraction of scientific papers after publication.”
A 2023 book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,” criticized the influence of figures like Gates in scientific publishing. A 2024 book review — published in Nature — stated the dispersal of these funds is being “driven mainly by the personal interests of a handful of super-rich individuals.”
“It’s not heavy-handed censorship — it’s subtle, invisible steering of ideas, trends, and ‘truths,’” ScienceGuardians wrote.
Jablonowski agreed. “Algorithmic control is authoritarian control, and largely without accountability.” He compared it to pandemic-era Big Tech censorship.
“With a few tweaks to the algorithms, Facebook and Google were able to direct and control the information most Americans consumed during the pandemic: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. — from which CHD was either banned or shadow-banned,” Jablonowski said...MORE...
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