CDC Accepts Pharma Money Through It’s Foundation

When The Media Says "Experts" They Mean Paid Corporate Shills (Part 35)

Despite claiming to accept no commercial support on its website, the CDC maintains a foundation, like several other federal agencies, that receives “donations” from numerous private entities including Pharma conglomerates such as Pfizer. This revelation was first made in the British Medical Journal in 2015, but the problem has persisted since. In November 2019, right before SARS-COV-2 was discovered, U.S. Right to Know petitioned the CDC to stop falsely claiming it accepts no commercial support on its website given the obvious and incontrovertible existence of it’s foundation that included donors ranging from other government agencies, civil society groups, billionaire philanthropist charities and Pharma companies. USRTK pointed out that the CDC accepted tens of millions of dollars in commercial support through the CDC Foundation which was set up under the Clinton admin and has accepted over $2 billion in private donations over the past 3 decades including $3.4 million from Pfizer in FY 2017-18 and over a million from Merck in FY 2018. Congress started allowing the agency to accept money from corporate donors in 1983 and created a foundation for it in 1992 which was launched in 1995. Corporate donations include money earmarked for studies or programs they want to justify expanding markets for their drugs. The benefits of giving earmarked donations to the CDC Foundation aren’t limited to the Pharmaceutical industry either because they’ve also accepted earmarked donations from the ultra-processed food and pesticide industry to conduct research that supports their bottom line as well. For instance, in 2011 a CRO called Exponent, Inc, a member of the CropLife America trade group that represents pesticide manufacturers, donated $60,000 to the foundation and subcontracted part of a study investigating the link between the herbicide Paraquat and Parkinson’s disease which was already funded to the tune of $1.5 million by the UK government. FOIA requests reveal that between 2010 and 2015, Coca Cola donated over a million to the foundation and received collaborative meetings and advice from a top CDC staffer on how to lobby WHO to curtail efforts to reduce added sugar consumption. As I mentioned in (Part 20), the CDC director of the division for heart disease and stroke prevention collaborated with the International Life Science Institute (ILSI) executive director on this lobbying effort. ILSI is a front group for Coca Cola and Unilever. In FY2023, the CDC Foundation’s top donors included the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Gavi Alliance (Another Gates Cut out), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (Johnson & Johnson non-profit), and the Moderna Charitable Foundation. Pfizer and the Pfizer Foundation have also been a consistent donor to the foundation and were top donors in FY2020 as of late. The CDC is far from an unbiased actor dedicated to objective truth; they have been ideologically aligned with their donor class for decades especially in the last few years. As I noted last year in (Part 22) the CDC also outsourced their vaccine PR and marketing to the same firm that had concurrent contracts with Pfizer and Moderna for PR services. The bribery and corporate stooging implicit in the CDC’s sham charity might explain why the U.S. is the only developed country where annual COVID boosters are still recommended to the general public; everyone else has scaled back this recommendation to seniors and immunocompromised individuals. I doubt any other country in the global north has the same pay to play set up; of course, I am open to evidence to the contrary.