How the CDC was Corrupted
The once-prestigious agency takes private money to produce results on demand
It is not widely known that the CDC is substantially funded by private money. The agency’s lavish federal budget is padded with many hundreds of millions cheerfully supplied by industry, foundations, and billionaires.
In 1992 Congress created the CDC Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization empowered to raise and contribute money to CDC. What should have been a disturbing development was little noticed at the time.
Presumably in response to corporate lobbying, the Foundation was designed as a passthrough by means of which private entities are able to donate funds to a putatively independent government agency. It is as though the Justice Department were allowed to accept money from private parties, including those under indictment or otherwise affected by the department’s actions.
The partial privatization of CDC had the expected results. Once it was authorized to mingle private funds with government support (and enter into “partnerships” with corporate enterprises), the agency began producing research that was suspiciously advantageous to corporate interests. A culture of corruption rapidly took hold and persists to this day, as evidenced by the countless flagrant lies told by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky on behalf of toxic and ineffective COVID vaccines.
The CDC Foundation began operations in 1995 and, by 2022, had raised over $1.6 billion and launched more than 1,200 health programs, primarily research endeavors. Studies were effectively commissioned by Big Pharma, Big Soda, et al., in the expectation that the research would support their business goals.
For example, in 2012 CDC recommended mass screening for Hepatitis C after receiving millions from Big Pharma, which was eager to promote lucrative testing and treatments for the disease. The BMJ reported:
The CDC issued guidelines in August 2012 recommending expanded (cohort) screening of everyone born from 1945 to 1965 for hepatitis C virus. The agency cited new direct acting antiviral drugs and protease inhibitors to treat hepatitis C as part of its rationale for cohort screening, saying the drugs “can halt disease progression and provide a virologic cure (ie, sustained viral clearance following completion of treatment) in most persons.” The science behind cohort screening has been challenged and is said to be “the subject of major debate.” The scientific debate along with the price tags of the newer drugs (over $84,000 per treatment course for the new drug sofosbuvir), raise questions about CDC’s industry funding. In 2010, the CDC, in conjunction with the CDC Foundation, formed the Viral Hepatitis Action Coalition, which supports research and promotes expanded testing and treatment of hepatitis C in the United States and globally. Industry has donated over $26m to the coalition through the CDC Foundation since 2010. Corporate members of the coalition include Abbott Laboratories, AbbVie, Gilead, Janssen, Merck, OraSure Technologies, Quest Diagnostics, and Siemens—each of which produces products to test for or treat hepatitis C infection.
Genentech earmarked $600,000 in donations to the CDC Foundation to promote expanded testing and treatment of viral hepatitis. Genentech and its parent company, Roche, manufacture test kits and treatments for Hepatitis C. CDC duly issued guidelines in August 2012 recommending expanded Hep C screening of everyone born between 1945 and 1965.
The Foundation took $1.7 million from the sugar industry in 2014 to study an epidemic of chronic kidney disease among men working in the cane fields of Central America and South Asia. The conflict of interest was stark. CDC was, in effect, commissioned to investigate a deadly work-related disease by the bosses of its victims.
In 2019 a FOIA request revealed that Coca-Cola bought research that it used to influence CDC policy makers, encouraging the agency to shift attention and blame for the obesity epidemic away from sugar-sweetened beverages. In a series of emails, Coke even suggested creating partnerships between the CDC and Big Soda as a way of outflanking sugar taxes.
At this time Coke was shoveling millions to the CDC via the Foundation. The emails reflect a cordial, extensive, and longstanding relationship between CDC officials and Big Soda executives, suggesting a well-developed system of influence-peddling.
Coca-Cola’s outreach to CDC was one facet of a multi-million dollar astroturfing operation centered on the “Global Energy Balance Network,” a non-profit organization serving as a front for Big Soda and promoting the idea that sugar is not a major factor in obesity.
On April 3, 2013, Rhona Applebaum, then Coca-Cola’s chief science and health officer and an architect of the Global Energy Balance Network, contacted the CDC’s Janet Collins:
Heartfelt congratulations on being named Director of The Division of Nutr [sic], Physical Activity and Obesity at CDC. Once settled would welcome the opportunity to come by and discuss current activities and what more can be done.
Collins replied:
Thanks Rhona. I am delighted to have joined the Division. I have some international travel coming up through mid-April but would be happy to meet after that.
Soon after, these friendly new “partners” began shopping resumes in a typical example of the notorious revolving door between federal agencies and private business. On October 27, 2014, Collins wrote Applebaum:
I hope you don’t mind if I share the fact that a CDC colleague of mine (Maureen Culbertson) is very interested in working at Coca-Cola . . . she would be great for external and governmental relations especially on food, beverage and physical activity policy as well as corporate philanthropy.
Applebaum replied:
Many thanks for the CV. I will share internally.
Other emails describe high-level meetings between Coca-Cola and CDC at which evidence presumed favorable to Coke was shared. Unsurprisingly, there is a Bill Gates connection. In 2015, when WHO Director-General Margaret Chan appeared to be leaning toward backing restrictions on the consumption of sugary soft drinks, Coke executive Alex Malaspina lobbied CDC for help. In an exchange between Malaspina and Barbara Bowman, director of the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, Bowman suggested bringing in “Mr. Bill Gates” to apply pressure. Malaspina drooled.
Dear Barbara, you gave some very good leads. I like the one especially about having Mr. Bill Gates help. Our Chairman knows him well.
(To complete the circle, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has frequently been criticized for its investments in companies that are at odds with public health goals — such as Coca-Cola.)
Overall, these email exchanges showed “what appear to be attempts to leverage personal relationships at the CDC to further [Coke’s] goals at the expense of population health – and lead[ing] to questions about whether organizations like the CDC should refrain from engaging in partnerships where there is such a potential for conflict of interest,” said Nason Maani Hessari, a research fellow in the Department of Health Services Research and Policy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Similar conflicts of interest abounded, though much information was withheld from the public. The Foundation’s donor reports were notoriously sketchy. Even so, evidence of graft eventually became so blatant that Congress was forced to step in, pressuring the CDC Foundation to clean up its act for the sake of appearances.
In 2018 the House Committee on Appropriations directed the CDC Foundation to reveal the source and amount of every gift received. Subsequently, the Foundation appears to have all but ceased accepting money from private corporations. Presumably the required disclosures would have been too embarrassing.
Instead, the CDC Foundation now raises funds primarily from non-profits managed by billionaires. Financial disclosures are still quite limited. For instance, we are allowed to know that CIA-connected Google billionaire Eric Schmidt gave more than $50,000 in FY 2022, but we cannot know how much more — probably millions.
Earmarked contributions are now listed in a nearly impenetrable document called the Annual Transparency Report. The spreadsheet is offered only in PDF format, so it is impossible to sort the data. It is nevertheless easy to see, for example, that the Gates Foundation donates many millions to finance studies of vaccines in development. Research that can no longer be directly commissioned by the pharmaceutical corporations can now be laundered through Bill Gates, who reliably acts and invests on behalf of Big Pharma.
Before I finish, a couple of provisos are in order. First, nothing in this article should be construed to suggest that CDC was an admirable institution in the years before it went on the pad. From its founding, the agency has rarely been shy of involving itself in the Mengele branch of research science.
For example, it supervised the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which 400 African American men were deceived and observed for 40 years as syphilis ravaged their bodies and infected their families.
During the 1940s, the interior walls of more than 4.6 million houses in the southern US were sprayed with the highly toxic insecticide DDT by Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, CDC’s predecessor. The action reduced the incidence of malaria, at the price of poisoning the food chain and causing untold damage to human health.
In the 1990s CDC dosed hundreds of pregnant women in Africa and Thailand with toxic AZT in order to test the drug’s effect on mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Needless to say, informed consent was not a priority.
There are many similar examples — all of which, of course, pale in comparison to the murderous worldwide rampage of fraud and deception sponsored by CDC during the high period of coronafascism.
A second proviso: The ruling class is quite capable of corrupting and capturing agencies like CDC without resorting to outright graft; it’s just more difficult. Bill Gates and his ilk will always be able to influence agency appointments, control researchers with sub rosa systems of intimidation and rewards, and build informal relationships with officials that ensure desired outcomes.
Moreover, direct control of research is now rarely necessary. Two or three generations of ambitious researchers are by now entirely comfortable with the prevailing regime of Science™, under which studies are funded and published only when their conclusions meet the needs of the powerful. Their corruption begins in grad school; their careers depend on a lifelong commitment to reproducing Received Wisdom on demand.
This has been true for some decades, but the reality became blindingly obvious during the past three years. As soon as the rulers pulled the trigger and launched the COVID operation, the vast majority of scientists fell immediately into line. They needed no prompting to produce the sort of papers that would guarantee funding and advancement. CDC grants were showered on anyone willing to fabricate pseudo-scientific studies that appeared to validate deadly authoritarian measures imposed by the powers.
So long as the ultra-wealthy continue to command all phases of scientific endeavor, we can expect to see comparable corruption underlying all the manufactured crises yet to come. CDC is not your friend.