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In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bill Gates and key figures from the Gates Foundation regularly interacted with Jeffrey Epstein, discussing ways to finance and develop a global pandemic preparedness and vaccination network.
The communications between Gates and Epstein were included in the “Epstein Files” released Jan. 30 by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Last year’s passage of the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act prompted the release.
Sayer Ji told The Defender the files show that Epstein “functioned as a switchboard” connecting “hedge funds, central banks, billionaires, academic institutions and global health initiatives.”
Ji published his analysis of health- and medical-related information in the files in a series of Substack articles and posts on X.
1/ The DOJ just released thousands of pages of Epstein files.
And buried inside them may be one of the biggest bombshells no one is talking about:
The blueprint for a 20-year financial architecture designed to turn pandemics into a profit center.
Offshore vaccine funds.… pic.twitter.com/2tA4pqhe26
— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) February 2, 2026
Seamus Bruner, director of research at the Government Accountability Institute, said the files revealed the workings of a network of “Controligarchs on steroids, but with shocking new receipts.”
Bruner said the files showed that Epstein helped develop “the architecture for pandemic profiteering” years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The documents largely date from the 2010s — after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting underage sex and his inclusion on a registry of sex offenders.
Ji noted that months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the same actors who appear in the Epstein files participated in Event 201 — a simulation of a global pandemic caused by a coronavirus.
The pandemic preparedness infrastructure built in the years before the pandemic helped lead to this simulation, Ji wrote.
According to The Hill, members of the U.S. Congress began reviewing unredacted versions of the documents on Monday.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), told The Defender the documents’ release is about justice, not politics.
“Rep. Ro Khanna and I have tried to keep the Epstein files from being political. The Democrats want to make it about Trump, and the Republicans want to make it about the Clintons. We want to make it about the survivors and getting them justice and transparency,” Massie said.
Gates, Epstein and the ‘architecture behind pandemics as a business model’
Ji’s series of Substack posts revealed what he described as “a 20-year architecture behind pandemics as a business model — with Bill Gates at the center of the network,” along with multinational financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase.
The documents, dating from 2011 to 2019, illustrate an “architecture whose foundations predate the COVID-19 era by more than a decade,” Ji wrote. He said they constitute evidence of “a major Wall Street bank asking a convicted sex offender to define the architecture of a Gates-linked charitable fund.”
The documents included several emails outlining the development of a Gates-led charitable fund. A Feb. 17, 2011, email from JPMorgan Chase’s Juliet Pullis to Epstein included questions from the “team that is putting together some ideas for Gates.”
Epstein’s reply outlined how this fund could be structured. The proposal would be developed further in the following months.
In a July 26, 2011, email from Epstein to JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley, on which Boris Nikolic, Gates’ chief science and technology adviser, was copied, described a “silo based proposal that will get bill [Gates] more money for vaccines.”
By Aug. 17, 2011, Staley and Mary Erdoes, then-CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management, were discussing more details of the proposed fund, including developing “an offshore arm — especailly for vaccines” and projecting “billions of dollars” in donations within two years.
In a response later that day, Epstein said Gates was “terribly frustrated” at the slow pace of establishing the fund. He said Gates was insistent that “additional money for vaccines” be included in an upcoming presentation about the fund.
By Aug. 31, 2011, JPMorgan Chase had apparently developed a proposal called “Project Molecule,” where the bank would partner with the Gates Foundation to develop a perpetual charitable fund for pandemic preparedness and surveillance, vaccine promotion and disease eradication.
According to Ji, the proposal contains many of the ideas Epstein had previously discussed with JPMorgan Chase executives. It also contained plans to spend millions of dollars to purchase oral polio vaccines for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a rotavirus vaccine for Latin America, and a meningitis vaccine for Africa.
The proposal suggested that Melinda Gates chair the fund’s strategic program/grant and distribution committee and that Erdoes, Warren Buffett, Jordan’s Queen Rania and Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, also participate. The Gates Foundation funded Gavi’s launch in 1999 and holds a permanent seat on its board.
Ji wrote that while Epstein’s name does not appear in the Project Molecule proposal, it acts as the “institutional translation of the architecture he was sketching informally.”
By 2013, these efforts appear to have led to the launch of the Global Health Investment Fund. A confidential Sept. 23, 2013, briefing described the fund as “the first investment fund focused on global health drug and vaccine development.” The fund promised investors annual returns of 5%-7%.
Among the attendees at the fund’s September 2013 launch were JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and representatives of Pfizer, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (now GSK).
Gates could ‘work with anyone on earth’ but ‘chose a registered sex offender’
According to Ji, Nikolic’s involvement is significant. In August 2013, Gates and Epstein signed an agreement, in which Gates “specifically requested” that Epstein “personally serve” as Nikolic’s representative. The letter noted Epstein’s “existing collegial relationship” with Gates.
“This agreement was executed five years after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution,” Ji wrote. “Gates had the resources to work with anyone on earth. He chose a registered sex offender — and put it in writing.”
The documents showed that a month earlier — on July 18, 2013 — Epstein authored a draft email apparently intended for Gates. It references Epstein’s friendship with Gates, his disappointment that Gates sent him an “unfriendly strongly worded email,” and referenced sordid communications the two apparently previously shared.
“TO add insult to the injury you them implore me to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda and the description of your penis,” Epstein wrote.
In a video posted on X, Michael Kane, director of advocacy for Children’s Health Defense, said that while it’s unknown whether Epstein ever sent that email to Gates, “the next month they’re in a contract together.”
“I think Bill Gates got the message,” Kane said.
In November 2023, a federal judge approved a $290 million settlement between JPMorgan Chase and over 100 women who accused Epstein of sexual abuse. The women alleged that JPMorgan Chase continued doing business with Epstein despite internal warnings over a span of several years.
“JPMorgan banked Epstein for years despite clear red flags — over $1 billion in suspicious transactions flagged internally and ignored. They knew. They didn’t care,” wrote The Truth About Cancer.
Did Epstein play role in launch of the ‘biosecurity state’?
According to Ji, the documents provide a roadmap for how a pandemic preparedness infrastructure was developed and how it helped make Event 201 possible.
“By the time Event 201 convened, the architecture … was no longer conceptual. It had been funded, structured, bonded, insured, staffed, and legally papered. What remained was the rehearsal,” Ji wrote.
September 2014 documents show that Gates disclosed his upcoming meeting with President Obama to Epstein, just as an adviser to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak sent Epstein an invitation to a private, off-the-record reception with Obama the following month.
Ji said the communications occurred during “the week Ebola was formally reclassified as a threat to international peace and security.” He said the timing is significant, as this “was the week the biosecurity state was born.”
According to Ji, these developments helped activate the infrastructure outlined in Project Molecule, where Epstein acted as a node for Ebola-related project proposals.
This included Epstein receiving a United Nations (U.N.) diplomat’s proposal for the development of a “Nexus Centre for peace and health” that would take “into account the serious impact of Ebola,” and a proposal by a group of scientists for a pre-symptomatic Ebola detection system using PCR testing.
The scientists behind the proposal — affiliated with a U.S. military biolab at Fort Detrick, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health — asked Epstein to send the proposal to Gates and the Gates Foundation.
By October 2014, Epstein was warning Kathy Ruemmler, then White House counsel to Obama, of the political cost if Obama didn’t take action on Ebola. By 2015, Epstein was acting as an intermediary in efforts to convene global experts who would “discuss how we can most effectively address and prevent pandemics.”
The proposal, by the International Peace Institute’s Terje Rød-Larsen, led to the convening of a May 2015 closed-door meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, titled “Preparing for Pandemics: Lessons Learned for More Effective Responses.” The World Health Organization (WHO), World Bank and U.N. were involved with the meeting.
The meeting’s agenda included sessions addressing “how pandemics should be anticipated, how authority should be exercised, how multiple stakeholders should be coordinated, and — critically — what legal, institutional, and financial mechanisms must be put in place in advance to enable rapid, centralized response,” Ji wrote.
According to Ji, the COVID-19 pandemic response has its roots in the 2014 Ebola response, as Ebola “was the first disease to formally justify the suspension of normal political and sovereign constraints on a global scale. … When the next global health emergency arrived — COVID-19 — the playbook was already written.”
“Epstein appears in the background of precisely these formative conversations — serving as a connector between global finance, philanthropic capital, and biological risk governance,” Ji told The Defender.
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Epstein involved in ‘strain pandemic simulation’ two years before COVID
By 2017, these conversations led to proposals for pandemic simulations.
In a January 2017 iMessage thread between Epstein and an unidentified physician seeking help in finding a new job, the physician cited “expertise with public health security.”
The physician, who had experience at the U.N., WHO, Gates Foundation and World Bank, said he “just did pandemic simulation,” which could become a “big platform.”
Referring to Gates, the physician told Epstein, “He hates mental health but he’s crazy about vaccines and autism stuff. That could be start to a more broad conversation.”
A March 2017 email chain, which included Epstein and Gates, discussed efforts by the then-bgC3, Gates’ private strategic office, to develop “Follow-up recommendations and/or technical specifications for strain pandemic simulation.”
Ji noted that in 2017, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) was launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF), with Gates Foundation funding and a goal of creating “pandemic-busting vaccines” within 100 days. Later that year, the World Bank issued the first-ever pandemic bonds.
Event 201, held just six weeks before the first publicly acknowledged COVID-19 cases were announced, involved the Gates Foundation, WEF and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Global financial institutions, media organizations and intelligence agencies also participated.
The simulation focused on the response to a novel coronavirus outbreak by governments, pharmaceutical companies, media outlets and social media platforms.
Ji said the Epstein Files don’t show that COVID-19 was planned or manufactured, or that Event 201 led to COVID-19. Instead, they prove that “the institutional infrastructure to capitalize on exactly this kind of crisis was already built, tested, staffed, and insured.”
Related articles in The Defender
- As Monkeypox Cases Spread, Report Shows Gates Foundation, WHO, Pharma Execs Took Part in Monkeypox Pandemic ‘Simulation’
- U.S. Pumps $667 Million Into World Bank’s Pandemic Fund
- Bill Gates — After Reaping Huge Profits Selling BioNTech Shares — Trashes Effectiveness of COVID Vaccines
- Davos: Gates, Schwab, Global Elites Face Growing Criticism of Their ‘Master the Future’ Agenda
- Before COVID, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates With Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA
- UN President Approves Pandemic Declaration — Privacy Experts Warn of ‘Digital Gulag’
