Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force Is a Rockefeller, Council on Foreign Relations, Gates Foundation Swamp

(A previous version of this article mistakenly identified Dr. Robert Rodriguez as a member of the Gates Foundation. We apologize for any confusion.)

As the media-ordained President-Elect Joe Biden announces his Coronavirus Task Force it is becoming increasingly clear that a Biden/Harris administration will maintain many of the relationships established under the Trump administration. 

On Monday, Joe Biden announced the creation of a COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board and a Coronavirus Task Force that will assume control of the fight against COVID-19 on January 20, 2021, should he eventually be sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Biden stated that Transition Advisory Board would help his presidential transition team establish rapid testing and a “core of contact tracers to track and curb this disease.”

Biden also issued a call for the American people to begin wearing masks “for the next few months” until a vaccine is available. Biden said the CDC has called a mask the “most potent weapon against the virus.” The former Vice President also repeated his warning that the U.S. was facing a “dark winter”, a phrase that has been repeated with increasing frequency over the two weeks.

As @JoeBiden said yesterday, we are facing a dark winter if we don’t get coronavirus under control. Please wear a mask to reduce the spread and save lives.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 10, 2020

Biden announced that his Coronavirus Task Force would be chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler and Yale University’s Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith. The three chairs would oversee ten other health professionals and experts in their field.

In previous investigations we have revealed the ties between the Trump admin’s Operation Warp Speed and Big Pharma, DARPA, and the Gates Foundation. These ties made it clear that the Trump admin was very much in partnership with the likes of Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation – institutions which maintain an exorbitant amount of influence and control on global health policy. An examination of the Biden Coronavirus Task Force reveals that these same institutions will continue to hold sway over the direction of the fight against COVID-19.

Connections to the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, and the CIA

Before we proceed, if you find yourself wondering, “what’s wrong with being connected to the Gates Foundation or Bill Gates?”, I recommend reading my 3-part investigation into Bill Gates. The simple fact is that Gates and his foundation have been able to gain influence and control of global health policies by funding and partnering with nearly every global organization involved in health in one fashion or another. This was apparent under Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed and it is apparent with Biden’s Task Force.

For starters, at least six members of the 13 member Task Force have worked directly with Gates or the Gates Foundation, while at least 3 others have tangential connections to Gates. Several members also have connections to the Rockefeller Foundation, which is also infamous for shaping international health policy.

Let’s begin with the tangential connections. These might not be evidence of a strong relationship with the Gates Foundation or other organizations, but they do show the consistent presence of these institutions. We will progress through each task force member and show an increasing amount of worrisome relationships.

Dr. Julie Morita is the Executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation who helped lead Chicago’s Department of Public Health for nearly 20 years. She has participated in events with the Gates Foundation.

Dr. Celine Gounder is a clinical assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. While she was on faculty at Johns Hopkins, she was the Director of Delivery at Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic. Gounder is currently a CNN Medical Analyst, and has appeared as an expert guest on CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera America, CBS, and the BBC.

Ms. Loyce Pace is the Executive director and president of the Global Health Council, who previously served in leadership positions at the American Cancer Society. GHC is supported by the Gates Foundation and gives out the Gates Award, named after Bill Gates. As recently as September 2020, the Gates Foundation gifted $25,000 to the GHC.

Dr. Eric Goosby is an infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine. During the Clinton administration Goosby was the founding director of the largest federally funded HIV/AIDS program. Goosby was also part of a 25-member commission convened by the Rockefeller Foundation and Boston University which focused on “how global decision-makers can better use burgeoning data on the wide range of factors influencing people’s health.”

In 2012, he participated in a panel with Bill Gates as part of the International AIDS Conference.

Michael Osterholm is the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and former science envoy for health security for the State Department. He also has connections to the Rockefeller Foundation. Osterholm was involved with the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation’s COVID-19 Testing Action Plan, along with Dr. Zeke Emanuel (see below).

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Osterholm described the Rockefeller plan:

“Finally, the Rockefeller report calls on states to hire at least 100,000 people to perform the work of testing and contact tracing. This, too, most likely requires federal funding — and has the virtue of doubling as a jobs program during this period of extremely high unemployment.”

Dr. Atul Gawande is Professor of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Harvard Medical School. Gawande served as a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration. Dr. Gawande appears to maintain a close friendship with Bill Gates, as evidenced by an an interview on CNBC where the two men were interviewed about their participation in a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The WEF is behind the push for a Great Reset. Gawande also moderated an event at the United Nations featuring Bill Gates and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Dr. Luciana Borio has served in senior leadership positions at the FDA, including Acting Chief Scientist. Some reports have claimed she “predicted” a pandemic was coming and the U.S. government was unprepared. In 2018, Borio told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.”

Borio is also the Vice president of technical staff at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, and was formerly a biodefense specialist on the National Security Council. The NSC is well-known as a haven for intelligence agents and government spokesman who advise the president. The NSC was also involved in the creation of the Presidential “Disposition Matrix”, otherwise known as the Presidential Kill List.

In August, Borio joined the Council on Foreign Relations think tank as a fellow. Borio was listed as a “stakeholder who participated in the R&D consultations” as part of The Neglected Dimension of Global Security: A Framework to Counter Infectious Disease Crises, a 2016 “consensus study report” funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust, among others. Each of these organizations have been extensively involved in the fight against COVID-19.

Borio was involved in another book examining global health threats which was also funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation. Frankly, the constant presence of these two organizations is a clear example of how extensively the foundations influence and shape global health policies.

We should note that Dr. David Kessler, Dr. Robert Rodriguez, and Dr. Eric Goosby, all have ties to the University of California, San Francisco. I have previously reported on UCSF’s role in the COVID-19 response, including working with Google on contact tracing apps and partnering with the Gates Foundation.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is an oncologist and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. Emanuel has long been the subject of controversy as Republicans have sought to connect him to the promotion of the so-called “death panels”, medical boards which ration healthcare and in some cases, decide who receives life-saving care.

While most of these claims seem overblown – Emanuel has opposed legalize euthanasia – he also wrote an essay called “Why I Hope To Die When I’m 75.” In the essay he argues that life after 75 is not worth living and that U.S. health care should not prioritize treatment for those over 75. “Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either,” Emanuel wrote.

Dr. “Zeke” Emanuel also sits on the Health Care Advisory Board of the Peterseon Center alongside Bill Gates. Gates also called Emanuel the “godfather of Obamacare” and recommended his book as summer reading. The two men appear to have a working relationship that goes back at least a decade. They have even appeared together on MSNBC. Emanuel has also worked with the Gates founded and funded GAVI Global Vaccine Alliance.

In April, Emanuel told MSNBC that COVID-19 would be around for at least 18 months and that the American public would “not be able to return to normalcy until a vaccine or effective medications.” He acknowledged that the American economy would be hit hard and people would have trouble finding work, but claimed “we have no choice” because without social distancing and masks “deaths could skyrocket into the hundreds of thousands, if not a million.” Additionally, in an op-ed piece to the NY Times he asked, “Why isn’t it mandatory to wear masks in public?”

Coincidentally, Dr. Emanuel is also the brother of former Mayor of Chicago and former Chief of State during the Obama administration. Among other things, Rahm Emanuel is infamous for a 2008 interview where he stated, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste, and what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” 

Rahm Emanuel brought his famous quote back in March while speaking about COVID-19. “Never allow a crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said on ABC This Week. “Start planning for the future. This has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic depression. We’re going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last economic depression.”

Dr. Rick Bright was recently celebrated as a whistleblower who attempted to hold the Trump administration accountable during the COVID-19 battle. Bright is an immunologist and virologist who was removed as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) for criticizing Trump’s handling of COVID-19.

While speaking in front of Congress, Bright stated, “without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history,” a phrase which Joe Biden repeating during the Presidential debates and again on Monday.

The appointment of Bright to the Coronavirus task force and Joe Biden’s growing use of the term “Dark Winter” could be a sign of potential chaos resulting from the final election outcome, and/or reports of an increase in COVID-19 cases and subsequent lockdowns around the world.

The presence of counter-terrorism experts, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, an In-Q-Tel executive, connections to the Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation are all signs that Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force will carry on the trends started under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.