In an internal email, the director of the National Institutes of Health stopped to sort out a question of rank. “In the last call there was a bit of confusion about who was leading (NIH or WEF),” Francis Collins wrote ahead of a teleconference. “I think this time it should be me. Agree?” The message sits inside a cache of NIH correspondence that, as investigative journalist Maryanne Demasi reports, runs back to at least 2016, three years before most Americans had heard the word coronavirus.
That cache is, for now, single-source reporting on private emails the public cannot yet read in full. So begin with the half of this record that is not in dispute, because that half is a press release.
On January 19, 2017, Bill Gates walked onto a stage in Davos and helped launch one of the institutions that would shape the Covid vaccine response. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations opened that morning at the World Economic Forum with $460 million in five-year founding pledges. Japan committed $125 million, Norway $120 million, the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust $100 million each, with Germany covering much of the rest. CEPI was built in response to the 2013–16 Ebola epidemic, by people who had decided the next outbreak was a question of when, not if. Its purpose was to compress the time between an outbreak and a deployable vaccine.
None of that was secret, which is what makes the 2020 framing hard to square with the calendar. The Covid response was sold as an institution caught flat-footed by a once-in-a-century surprise, governments improvising through fog. The record shows something narrower: the response infrastructure already existed, it had a budget, and the people who would direct it were already in their chairs.
Demasi’s cache fills in the private side. She reports emails in which Collins coordinates with the World Economic Forum, the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the World Bank on the architecture of global biomedical research, including a proposed $10 billion African science and innovation fund and a vaccine-prioritization tool called SMART Vaccines. Those specifics rest on her reporting alone, and the underlying emails are not yet public. What the quoted messages establish is narrow and still worth stating plainly: senior US research officials were settling who would lead which coordination calls and initiatives years before any particular emergency. They do not show anyone engineering a virus, and they do not establish foreknowledge of a specific outbreak.
The money, though, was on the books in public. A 2021 analysis in the journal Vaccine documented NIH’s pre-pandemic spending on vaccine readiness, the platform work that made the 2020 rollout possible at the speed it happened. That speed was not luck. It was the product of commitments made years earlier by the same institutions that later presented the timeline as a triumph of improvisation.
The clearest single transaction runs straight through that platform. In January 2020, within days of the novel coronavirus sequence going public, CEPI funded Moderna’s mRNA candidate, the vaccine that NIH’s own Vaccine Research Center, housed inside Anthony Fauci’s NIAID, helped design. The coalition that stood up at Davos in 2017 wrote one of the first checks to the company, and the federal agency that helped build the underlying science took a hand in the product. Funder, regulator, and developer were the same small set of people, working the same problem, paying one another.
Then the apparatus turned on the scientists who questioned it, and the same name appears. After the Great Barrington Declaration, the October 2020 statement against blanket lockdowns from epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya, Collins did not answer its argument. In an email to Fauci he dismissed the three as “fringe epidemiologists” and called for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of their declaration, as later reporting on his correspondence documented. The man arranging the global preparedness architecture in 2017 was, by 2020, arranging the suppression of the scientists asking how that architecture was being used.
One of those three now runs the agency. Jay Bhattacharya was confirmed as NIH director and took office in April 2025. The institution he leads is the legal custodian of the unredacted Collins emails, which is the closest thing this story has to a resolution and is not much of one.
Follow the structure and the incentives line up without anyone needing to allege a plot. Philanthropic capital, the WEF’s convening platform, and the NIH’s federal budget pooled into one coordinated enterprise whose members answered mostly to each other. The Moderna check is that pattern in miniature: the bodies that built the runway also flew the plane.
So here is who has the data and here is who does not. The NIH holds the complete email cache. The foundations and the WEF hold their own copies of the coordination they paid for. The public, which funded the NIH and was governed by the apparatus those emails describe, has a few quoted lines and a litigation docket. The transparency group US Right to Know filed suit against the Department of Health and Human Services in March 2026, and has spent years litigating against the Department of Defense over related pandemic-origins records. The pattern in both is delay, redaction, and exemption claims rather than disclosure.
No one has shown that anyone planned a pandemic, and the emails so far do not come close. What they show is an entire response architecture, leadership included, assembled in public view and in private correspondence years before the event, run by people who then spent the years after deciding how much of the record the rest of us would be allowed to see.
Sources
- Maryanne Demasi – “NIH internal emails reveal pandemic planning years before Covid”
- CEPI – official launch at the World Economic Forum, Davos (January 2017)
- CBS News – “Davos 2017: Bill Gates introduces CEPI, initiative to prevent global epidemics”
- STAT News – “Francis Collins moved to shut down” the Great Barrington Declaration
- Business Wire – “Moderna Announces Funding Award from CEPI” (January 2020)
- Vaccine (2021) – “NIH funding for vaccine readiness before the COVID-19 pandemic”
- NIH – “Jay Bhattacharya Begins Tenure as 18th Director of the National Institutes of Health” (2025)
- CourtListener – US Right to Know v. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (N.D. Cal., 2026)
- CourtListener – US Right to Know v. Dept. of Defense / Uniformed Services University (N.D. Cal., 2023)