The billionaire wielded his foundation’s vast wealth to push countries to spend more on vaccination, the former German chancellor says
Bill Gates turned the vast financial resources of his foundation into political leverage, using its wealth to pressure governments to spend more on vaccination, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said.
In the Meckel & Matthes podcast released by Handelsblatt earlier this month, Merkel warned that uncontrolled corporate power could leave governments doing “what the corporations order.” She said she first saw the danger not with the rise of artificial intelligence, but when Gates set up his foundation, which had more money “than the development budgets of major industrialized countries.”
An unelected billionaire had effectively put himself on a political footing with elected leaders, according to Merkel.
“He was suddenly received at least as warmly by some heads of state in the world as I was,” Merkel recalled. “And then he also had the power – by virtue of his money – to exert moral pressure.” If governments failed to provide enough funding for the international vaccine alliance, “we were immediately in a bad light,” she said.
Gates would then tell African leaders that “Merkel had been stingy this year,” she recalled. “And with that, he had gained considerable power.”
The vaccine alliance Merkel referred to is Gavi, a public-private partnership involving governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and private donors. The Gates Foundation was a founding partner, providing $750 million in seed funding, and has since contributed billions of dollars to the organization. Germany became a major Gavi donor during her chancellorship, pledging €600 million for 2016-2020 and another €600 million for 2021-2025.
The former chancellor said the foundation had focused heavily on a handful of areas, including vaccination. When she asked Gates about putting more money into education, he told her that the results there were harder to measure because teachers, countries and students differed.
That left governments with difficult choices over limited development budgets, Merkel said. They still had to fund education while Gates pressed them to put money into vaccination and diseases such as malaria. “That’s the kind of constraint you get caught in,” she said.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Gates Foundation worked closely with major global health organizations and collected extensive funding for worldwide health and vaccine initiatives.
The foundation, originally known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was renamed the Gates Foundation after Melinda French Gates stepped down as co-chair in 2024, three years after the couple divorced. Their marriage had reportedly been strained in part by Bill Gates’ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Days after Merkel’s remarks, Gates said his foundation had dropped its goal of eradicating measles worldwide, citing growing reluctance to get vaccinated in wealthy countries. “At one point, the foundation wanted to eradicate measles, but the vaccine hesitancy in rich countries has meant that’s not on our list of goals,” he told Reuters, calling it “kind of tragic.”
