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The nonprofit that published “The Disinformation Dozen” list of “leading online anti-vaxxers” collaborated with Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, but didn’t disclose that information to the IRS, a new analysis of internal documents reveals.
Minutes from a Jan. 8, 2024, meeting of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) detail plans to collaborate with Gavi through a series of jointly organized roundtables to counter what the groups characterized as anti-vaccine narratives in the public sphere.
“We told Gavi we would do roundtables. There will be 1-3 between now and March, bringing public health figures back into our public accountability asks. Because anti vaxx has fallen off the radar for many people, so we need to bring back,” the minutes read.
The Gates Foundation is the largest private donor to Gavi. Further references to the CCDH-Gavi roundtables appear in the minutes of CCDH’s Feb. 19, 2024, meeting, indicating that the first roundtable was scheduled for that week.
Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo, highlighted the collaboration in an analysis published last week on Substack.
Ji suggested the groups intentionally hid their collaboration, possibly in violation of tax laws — and maybe even to conceal an attempt to interfere with Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
🚨1/ Leaked internal CCDH minutes show GAVI, the world’s largest vaccine alliance, commissioned “roundtables” from the group behind the Disinformation Dozen — to “bring back” public pressure on vaccine-safety voices, including @RobertKennedyJr
Neither side has ever disclosed… pic.twitter.com/3Yp1UkZweX
— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) August 15, 2026
CCDH, Gavi were calling for ‘black ops’ against Kennedy
The documents were first leaked in 2024 to investigative journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi.
Ji told The Defender that his investigation into whether CCDH disclosed its Gavi ties to the IRS reveals a likely “conflict of interest” — and possible collusion to target Kennedy, who was then running for president of the U.S.
In 2024, when CCDH and Gavi were planning a coordinated attack on “anti-vaxxers,” CCDH was also calling for “Black ops” against Kennedy, according to the Jan. 8, 2024, meeting.
“Black ops” are defined as a “secret mission or campaign carried out by a military, governmental, or other organization, typically one in which the organization conceals or denies its involvement.”
“Proximity on the page [of the meeting documents] isn’t proof of coordination, but it’s the kind of detail that changes how carefully a document deserves to be read,” Ji said.
In March 2021, CCDH published “The Disinformation Dozen,” which included Kennedy and Ji. Its impact was immediate, as key Biden administration officials publicly referenced the list and its members and accused them of spreading dangerous “disinformation” and “misinformation.”
Social media giants also began de-platforming some of the people on the list. The “Twitter Files,” released in 2022 and 2023, showed that Big Tech worked with the government to censor those on the “Disinformation Dozen” list.
Nebraska chiropractor Ben Tapper was also included among the “Disinformation Dozen.” He said the CCDH documents show that “powerful, unelected organizations” — such as Gavi — operate “behind closed doors to influence what you are allowed to hear, question and say.”
CCDH-Gavi ties a ‘conflict-of-interest gap that would draw scrutiny’
Writing on Substack, Ji suggested the latest revelations are notable not just for the information that has been made public, but also for what’s missing.
“Gavi does not appear as a related organization, funder, or transaction partner on CCDH’s IRS Schedule R. … The relationships exist, on the documentary record, only inside CCDH’s own operational minutes,” Ji wrote.
According to the IRS, nonprofits are required to disclose “related organizations” — or “organizations that stand in a parent/subsidiary relationship, brother/sister relationship, sponsoring organization of or contributing employer” — in Schedule R, Form 990. Nonprofits are required to file Form 990 annually.
Ji wrote that the CCDH minutes show that “two large international organisations — one of them funded by sovereign governments including the United States — engaged a campaigning group’s services in ways that neither side has ever disclosed.”
Ji told The Defender that he has not found “an IRS determination, a regulatory investigation, or an enforcement action tied to this gap” and is not claiming that one exists.
However, he said the omission of any reference to Gavi in CCDH’s IRS filings, as the group collaborated with Gavi while it was also actively meeting with members of Congress, deserves scrutiny.
Ji said:
“A U.S. 501(c)(3) running an active Capitol Hill operation — its own minutes reference 60 meetings on the Hill and briefings with 16 congressional offices in a two-week span — while the entities directing significant portions of its campaign work don’t appear anywhere in its own disclosure documents, is exactly the kind of conflict-of-interest gap that would draw scrutiny, and likely disclosure obligations, in any regulated industry.”
Ji said such concerns are “a legitimate question for the IRS and for Congress to put to CCDH directly, using subpoena power that journalism doesn’t have.”
Gavi, CCDH collaboration ‘not a small thing to leave unresolved’
CCDH and Gavi maintain close ties to the U.S. and foreign governments — and to major international organizations, according to Ji.
“CCDH is a parastatal, British/US intelligence cutout organisation,” Ji wrote, referencing the ties the group and its co-founder and CEO, Imran Ahmed, allegedly maintain to political and intelligence organizations in the U.S. and U.K.
Gavi is “not a small player,” Ji wrote, noting that it was launched at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2000 as a partnership of the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the World Bank and what was then known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The global public-private partnership promotes childhood vaccination in the world’s poorest countries, “receives sovereign funding, including from the United States,” Ji wrote.
According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy, the Gates Foundation has contributed $7.7 billion to Gavi over the last 25 years. The foundation funded Gavi’s launch and holds a permanent seat on Gavi’s board.
The Gates Foundation and Gavi are two of the largest donors to the WHO.
Ji said the newly resurfaced CCDH documents are significant in light of the links CCDH and Gavi maintained with such powerful actors. He wrote:
“That is the frame the January 2024 commission belongs in. An alliance that structurally includes vaccine manufacturers, sovereign donor governments, and philanthropic capital committed a UK campaigning organisation to revive public pressure on the people most associated with questioning vaccine safety — in an arrangement that shows up in neither organisation’s disclosures.”
The CCDH-Gavi link is also significant because it formed just before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Ji said.
Kennedy was an independent candidate at the time, before withdrawing and endorsing Trump.
“Gavi commissioned a campaign aimed at the same category of people — ‘anti-vaxx,’ ‘public health figures’ — that CCDH had already targeted by name in its 2021 Disinformation Dozen report, in the same meeting where CCDH’s chief executive flagged black-ops activity against the most prominent person in that category. That’s a documented institutional overlap,” Ji said.
Ji suggested that Gavi may have sought to influence the 2024 election because the political — and financial — stakes were high for the organization.
“Within 18 months, that same institution — Gavi — became financially dependent on that candidate’s regulatory judgment: as HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. froze and then conditioned $600 million in U.S. funding to Gavi over vaccine-safety concerns, before the State Department released it on July 29, 2026, contingent on Gavi phasing out mercury-containing vaccines.”
According to Ji, Ahmed was recorded in the Jan. 8, 2024, CCDH meeting minutes as saying that black ops against Kennedy were “being set up” — but the documents don’t provide details as to who was establishing such operations or who else was involved.
This “is not a small thing to leave unresolved,” Ji wrote. “Whoever was setting them up, the chief executive of a registered charity knew that black operations were being organised against a candidate for the American presidency,” and “recorded it in the monthly planning minutes between an item on advertising and an item on regulatory strategy.”
‘An assault on free speech, informed consent, and bodily autonomy’
CCDH is now the subject of a congressional investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee.
The organization has also been linked to the Democratic Party and to “dark money” networks — including billionaire financier George Soros and his Open Society Foundations.
The House investigation remains “ongoing but hasn’t produced a final report specifically on CCDH,” Ji wrote. The investigation has instead been “folded into the Committee’s wider ‘Foreign Censorship Threat’ investigation.”
Ahmed, who is a U.K. citizen and is tied to key figures in the U.K. government — including some with links to financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — is facing deportation from the U.S.
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Ahmed is challenging the deportation order, which the U.S. Department of State issued in December 2025. He obtained a temporary restraining order blocking his arrest or detention. The case remains active and pending.
Last month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s visa policy targeting foreign disinformation researchers, on First Amendment grounds. Ji said this is the policy under which the State Department ordered Ahmed’s deportation.
“As of today, Ahmed remains in the U.S. under court protection while litigation continues,” Ji said.
For members of the “Disinformation Dozen,” free speech isn’t being protected, Tapper said. Instead, it remains under attack.
“At what point do we stop calling this public health and start calling it what it is, an assault on free speech, informed consent, and bodily autonomy?” Tapper asked.
Related articles in The Defender
- Group Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Sought to ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter,’ Launch ‘Black Ops’ Against RFK Jr.
- The ‘Disinformation Dozen’: Targeted by Government, Maligned by Media. Where Are They Today?
- Architect of ‘Disinformation Dozen’ Praises ‘Disinformation Researchers’ for New Laws Targeting Online Speech
- Key Architect of ‘Disinformation Dozen’ List Resigns After ‘Epstein Files’ Reveal Tangled Web of Censorship
- Mastermind Behind ‘Disinformation Dozen’ List Took Money From Foundation Linked to Soros
- Gates Pledges $1.6 Billion for More Vaccines for Poor Countries, as RFK Jr. Stands by U.S. Decision to Cut Funding
