The latest DOJ batch of Epstein files reveal that by the time the world encountered COVID-19, the financial, philanthropic, and institutional machinery to manage—and profit from—a pandemic was already firmly in place.
While the Epstein files have reignited scrutiny around specific relationships, their deeper significance lies in how they intersect with a much longer and largely unexamined timeline. Public records, institutional initiatives, and financial instruments indicate that the conceptual foundations of pandemic preparedness as a managed financial and security category began to take shape in the late 1990s and early 2000s, as philanthropic capital, global health governance, and risk finance increasingly converged.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, this framework rapidly accelerated—expanding through reinsurance markets, parametric triggers, donor-advised funding structures, and global simulations—years before COVID-19 made the architecture visible to the public.
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What This Investigation Examines—and What It Does Not
This investigation is not concerned with the origins of COVID-19 itself. Rather, it examines what was already in place before it arrived. Drawing on internal emails, financial agreements, text messages, and planning documents—particularly from the 2011–2019 period, when many of these systems moved from conceptual to operational—the record shows that pandemics and vaccines were already being treated as standing financial and strategic categories. Investment vehicles, donor-advised fund structures, simulation programs, and reinsurance products were not improvised in response to crisis; they were refined and expanded within an architecture whose foundations predate the COVID-19 era by more than a decade. Exercises such as Event 201 make clear that coronavirus pandemics were not hypothetical abstractions, but explicitly modeled scenarios—integrated into financial, philanthropic, and policy planning well before COVID-19 emerged.
Executive Summary
- Vaccines as capital strategy: Internal JPMorgan emails from 2011 show Jeffrey Epstein advising the bank’s most senior executives on how to pitch a Gates-anchored donor-advised fund, insisting the presentation include the phrase “additional money for vaccines” and directing the creation of an “offshore arm — especially for vaccines.”
- Pandemics as a funding vertical: A 2017 email thread between Epstein, Gates, and Boris Nikolic names “pandemic” as a “key area” for donor-advised fund structures—three years before COVID-19.
- Pandemic simulation as career currency: A January 2017 iMessage thread from Epstein’s phone shows an associate listing “pandemics (just did pandemic simulation)” as a professional credential—while simultaneously discussing career placement into Gates’ private office, Boris Nikolic’s Biomatics Capital, Merck’s vaccine team, and Swiss Re’s pandemic reinsurance products.
- Crisis as investable asset: A Gates Foundation briefing describes the Global Health Investment Fund as an “impact investment” vehicle targeting five-to-seven percent returns on drugs and vaccines, backed by a sixty percent principal guarantee.
- Simulation as technical deliverable: A 2017 internal scope document from bgC3, Gates’ private office, lists “strain pandemic simulation” alongside neurotechnology and national defense applications.
- The pandemic preparedness network: A 2015 Gates Foundation letter confirms pandemic preparedness coordination with the International Peace Institute—led by Terje Rød-Larsen, a documented Epstein dinner guest—while Epstein separately feeds Rød-Larsen Gates’s public pandemic messaging.
Prologue: The Architecture You Weren’t Meant to Notice
Nobody builds a fire station after the fire. That would be reactive. What the documents below reveal is something different—something closer to a fire station built beside a factory that stores accelerants, owned by the same people who wrote the building code.
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The emails, agreements, text messages, investment briefings, and scope memos examined in this report do not prove that COVID-19 was manufactured or deliberately released. That is a separate evidentiary question. What they do show—in the participants’ own words—is that pandemics and vaccines were treated as standing financial and strategic categories years before any declared pandemic, complete with capital vehicles, legal frameworks, communications strategies, patent portfolios, simulation programs, reinsurance products, and rehearsal events.
The people building those structures were not public health officials reacting to emerging threats. They were financiers, private-office strategists, pharmaceutical executives, and convicted intermediaries working inside boardrooms at JPMorgan, drafting scope documents at Gates’ private office, coordinating across offshore jurisdictions, and brokering career placements into vaccine teams and pandemic reinsurance units.
That distinction matters. Preparedness is a public good. Pre-alignment of profit, power, and narrative control around a predicted crisis category is not—and the documents that follow show how easily such alignment drifts from public service into systemic exploitation.
The Questionnaire: JPMorgan Comes to Epstein
Before the phrases that would later define this story—“money for vaccines,” “offshore arm,” “strain pandemic simulation”—there was a questionnaire. And the questionnaire tells you who was running things.
On February 17, 2011, Juliet Pullis, a JPMorgan executive working under Jes Staley, emailed Jeffrey Epstein with a structured list of questions. She explained that Staley had asked her to pass them along. The questions came from “the JPM team that is putting together some ideas for Gates.”
Source: Email thread titled “Re: from Jes” dated February 17–18, 2011. (EFTA00904739–40)
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The questions were precise and operational: What are the sponsors’ objectives? Is anonymity important? Is JPMorgan expected to advise or implement? Who directs the investments—the principal or the individual donors? Who directs the grants? What technology platform is expected?
This is not a cold pitch. This is a major Wall Street bank asking a convicted sex offender to define the architecture of a Gates-linked charitable fund. JPMorgan wasn’t offering Epstein a seat at the table. They were asking him to design the table.
Epstein’s reply, sent the same evening, is remarkably fluent. He describes a JPMorgan donor-advised fund with a “stellar board, broken down into investment committee and distribution.” He references the Giving Pledge—the Gates-Buffett program in which billionaires commit to giving away more than half their net worth—and notes that more than sixty billion dollars had already been pledged. Then he identifies the opening:
“The next step is unknown. They all have a tax advisor, but have no real clue on how to give it away.”
He describes the fund’s relationship to the bank in language that goes well beyond advisory: “JPM would be an integral part. Not advisor… operator, compliance.”He envisions the bank not as a consultant recommending options, but as the operational backbone of the vehicle—handling compliance, administration, and investment execution.
Jes Staley’s response to all of this was two words: “We need to talk.”
The Sentence That Should Stop You Cold
Five months later—in July 2011—Epstein sent an internal email to Jes Staley, with Boris Nikolic, Bill Gates’ chief science and technology advisor, now copied. The email describes the proposed donor-advised fund in more developed terms. Buried in the operational language is a phrase worth reading twice:
“A silo based proposal that will get Bill more money for vaccines.”
Source: Email titled “GATES…” dated July 26, 2011 (EFTA01860211.pdf)
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Not “more research.” Not “emergency capacity.” Not “public health resilience.” Money. For vaccines. That is the language of capital formation, not charity.
The CEO’s Questions, the Convict’s Answers
Three weeks later, on August 17, 2011, Mary Erdoes—CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management—emailed Epstein directly with a second set of structured questions in advance of an upcoming meeting. She was writing from Maroon Bells, Colorado—on vacation—and cc’d Jes Staley.
Her questions were precise: What role will the Gates Foundation play vis-à-vis other donors? What is the profile of potential donors, including tax status? How important is anonymity? Is pooling of investments a core feature? What is the potential funding amount? What is the timeline for launch?
Source: Email titled “Re: Questions” dated August 17, 2011. (EFTA01256269)
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Epstein’s reply, sent within minutes, is sweeping. No foundation input on investments. Donors choose from custom portfolios or predefined silos—a mutual fund concept. The fund would be “mostly initially American” but, he adds:
“However we should be ready with an offshore arm — especially for vaccines.”
He projects “billions of dollars” in the first two years and “tens of billions by year 4.” The timeline, he says, “depends only on JPM ability to organize, legal, structure, internet presence, staffing.” The bottleneck is not Gates. It is not the donors. It is the bank’s capacity to build what Epstein has already designed.
The fund would exist in perpetuity, with succession controls. Not a thematic spend-down. Not a time-limited initiative. A permanent vehicle—designed to outlive its creators.
And he adds that the fund would have “access to the current Foundation’s pools of targets” while also “looking for both new opportunities with metrics for success.” In a single email, Epstein has sketched a vehicle with global reach, offshore flexibility, perpetual duration, and direct access to the Gates Foundation’s pipeline.
The CEO of JPMorgan’s $2 trillion asset management division did not ask compliance to review this. She did not flag the source. She asked for answers before the 31st—and she got them the same night, from a man whose email signature read: “It is the property of Jeffrey Epstein.”
The Tension: Making Money from a Charitable Organization
Eleven days later, on August 28, 2011, Epstein sent a follow-up email to Staley and Erdoes outlining the donor-advised fund concept in even greater detail. The structure he describes is not a typical charitable vehicle. It is a financial platform:
The fund would be tied “initially just to the Gates program.” Minimum gift: one hundred million dollars. Projected scale: one hundred billion dollars within two years. The structure would include advisory boards, investment committees, grant committees, administration mirroring a mutual fund, valuation services for illiquid or “funky assets,” and investment management farmed out to Highbridge—a JPMorgan-affiliated hedge fund.
Then comes the line that acknowledges the contradiction at the center of the entire apparatus:
“The tension is making money from a Charitable Org. Therefore the money making parts need to be arms length.”
Source: (EFTA01835356)
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The architect of this structure—a man convicted of sex crimes against minors—is explicitly acknowledging that the vehicle is designed to generate profit under the legal cover of charity. His proposed solution is not to eliminate the profit motive but to obscure it through “arm’s length” separation.
“Bill Is Terribly Frustrated”
The same August 2011 email chain contains another revealing passage. Epstein, writing to Erdoes, describes Gates’ emotional state regarding the pace of the project:
“Bill is terribly frustrated. He would like to boost some of the things that are working without taking away from those that are not… therefore, explaining that this would allow ‘additional money for vaccines’ must be included in the presentation.”
Source: Email titled “Re: Questions” dated August 17, 2011. (EFTA01301108)
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This sentence tells us four things at once. First, Epstein is speaking with direct knowledge of Gates’ internal emotional state. Second, he is shaping JPMorgan’s presentation strategy. Third, vaccine funding is the hook—the narrative justification for the financial structure. And fourth, Epstein is the one dictating what “must be included” to close the deal.
In the same correspondence, Epstein describes the Gates Foundation as “a very very sensitive bunch that has spent billions… there is little that can be held up as a great success and even polio is not yet finished.” This is not philanthropy analysis. It is client management. Epstein is coaching a Wall Street executive on how to handle a billionaire’s insecurities.
Why Donor-Advised Funds Matter
A brief clarification for readers unfamiliar with the financial architecture at the center of this story.
Donor-advised funds are not illegal or inherently abusive. They are widely used charitable vehicles that allow donors to receive an immediate tax deduction while retaining advisory influence over how their contribution is invested and eventually distributed as grants. Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard all operate DAFs. They are mainstream.
What makes them relevant here is scale, opacity, and timing. When DAFs are designed for perpetual duration, offshore flexibility, hundred-million-dollar minimums, and investment-first logic—when their stated purpose is not merely charitable giving but the generation of returns through vehicles like hedge funds and structured products—they blur the line between philanthropy and financial engineering in ways public oversight rarely penetrates.
The tax benefit is immediate. The charitable distribution can be deferred indefinitely. And the investment returns generated in the interim accrue inside a tax-exempt structure. When Epstein writes that “the tension is making money from a charitable org” and proposes “arm’s length” separation as the solution, he is describing not an abuse of the system but the system working exactly as designed—at a scale most regulators never anticipated.
For readers seeking a contemporary example of how donor-advised fund opacity can intersect with political influence and cross-border advocacy, see: Foreign Influence Exposed: Schwab Charitable Fund Joins UK-Based Attack on US Free Speech
Impact Investing: When Crisis Becomes an Asset Class
If the 2011 emails show the pitch, a separate Gates Foundation briefing document reveals the philosophy in its mature form.
A confidential 15-page briefing prepared for a JPMorgan-hosted panel on September 23, 2013, describes the Global Health Investment Fund as “the first investment fund focused on global health drug and vaccine development.” The fund explicitly targets financial returns in the range of five to seven percent, while returning all investor capital.
Source: Briefing titled “JPM Panel – Launch of the Global Health Investment Fund.” (0EFTA01103797)
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The mechanism for de-risking private investment is critical: the Gates Foundation and other partners provide a sixty percent guarantee of principal, meaning investors could participate in vaccine and drug development with the majority of their downside absorbed by philanthropic and sovereign capital.
This is the structural logic of pandemic finance laid bare: public risk, philanthropic backstop, private upside. Vaccines and global health tools are reframed not as public goods to be funded and forgotten, but as investable assets whose risk profiles are deliberately engineered for capital participation.
The Pandemic Preparedness Network: Gates, Epstein, and the International Peace Institute
The article’s previous sections follow the money. This one follows the meeting invitations—and they lead to the same places.
On March 9, 2015, Amy K. Carter, Deputy Director of Family Interest Grants at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, wrote to Dr. Terje Rød-Larsen, President of the International Peace Institute, regarding IPI’s proposal for “a convening of experts to discuss how we can most effectively address and prevent pandemics.”
Source: Gates Foundation letter to IPI. March 9, 2015. (EFTA02713880 / EFTA_R1_02137620)
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The Foundation declined to fund the convening but confirmed that many of the groups in IPI’s proposal were “already in discussions with Gates Foundation staff about pandemic preparedness and response” in the lead-up to the World Health Assembly and G7. The letter noted these would be “key topics” at both forums.
Now recall: Rød-Larsen is the same man who attended the September 2013 dinner at Epstein’s residence alongside both Bill and Melinda Gates and Thorbjørn Jagland, then Secretary-General of the Council of Europe. This is not a tangential connection. Rød-Larsen’s institution is proposing pandemic convenings to Gates—and his private social life runs through Epstein’s dining room.
Three months later, on June 2, 2015, Epstein forwarded Rød-Larsen a Vox article about Bill Gates and flu pandemic preparedness—without comment, just the link. The URL: vox.com/2015/5/27/8660249/gates-flu-pandemic.
Source: Email from Jeffrey Epstein to Terje Rød-Larsen. June 2, 2015. (EFTA02499005)
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The pattern is precise: Gates’s Foundation declines to fund Rød-Larsen’s pandemic convening in March. Epstein sends Rød-Larsen Gates’s public pandemic messaging in June. The institutional channel says no. The Epstein channel keeps the line open. This is the function of an intermediary: maintaining relationships that formal institutions cannot—or will not—maintain themselves.
From Proposal to Power: The May 2015 Geneva Pandemic Preparedness Convening
The proposal did not remain theoretical. In May 2015, the International Peace Institute convened a closed-door, high-level meeting in Geneva titled “Preparing for Pandemics: Lessons Learned for More Effective Responses.” The agenda reveals a convergence of institutional power rarely assembled outside moments of declared crisis: the Director-General of the World Health Organization, the President of the World Bank, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International President of Médecins Sans Frontières, and senior UN and global health officials.
Notably, the agenda for this Geneva convening circulated privately in advance, referenced explicitly in a March, 20th 2015 Epstein email from International Peace Institute leadership and forwarded through diplomatic channels weeks before the meeting convened—underscoring that this convergence was planned, coordinated, and deliberate rather than emergent.
The framing of the meeting is itself revealing. Rather than focusing narrowly on epidemiology or retrospective analysis, the agenda is structured around forward-looking governance questions: 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. One full session is dedicated to identifying legal and managerial gaps, institutional bottlenecks, and pressure points that had constrained prior responses, followed by another focused explicitly on implementation: who should be responsible, how policies should be operationalized, and how international follow-through should occur.
In this context, pandemic preparedness is not treated as contingency planning for rare events, but as a standing domain of global governance—one requiring pre-aligned authority, pre-established chains of responsibility, and ready financial instruments. The presence of the World Bank alongside humanitarian and health institutions underscores that pandemics were already being conceptualized not only as public health crises, but as systemic shocks demanding coordinated financial and policy response. This architecture was being assembled years before COVID-19, and long before the public would be invited into any meaningful debate about its scope, legitimacy, or consequences.
Source: International Peace Institute. “Preparing for Pandemics: Lessons Learned for More Effective Responses” (Agenda). Geneva, May 2015. (EFTA_R1_01347204)
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Pandemic as a Category—Not an Event
In May 2017, an email thread involving Epstein, Gates, and Boris Nikolic returns to the donor-advised fund concept. Epstein frames DAFs as a “counter balance” to anticipated cuts in public science funding. Nikolic responds with a line that deserves to be read slowly:
“It might be a great path forward for some key areas such as Energy, pandemic etc.”
Source: Email thread dated May 24, 2017. (EFTA00697005)
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Pandemic is listed as a standing category—equivalent to energy—suitable for long-term private capital mobilization. This is not the language of emergency response. It is the language of portfolio strategy.
By 2017, three years before COVID-19, the people closest to Gates were already treating pandemics as a durable funding vertical—a domain that would persist regardless of whether a specific outbreak materialized.
The Rolodex: Pandemic Simulation as Career Currency
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The most startling document in this batch is not an email to a bank executive or a foundation letter. It is a text message thread—an iMessage conversation from Epstein’s phone, dated January 20–23, 2017—between Epstein (using the handle [email protected]) and an unidentified associate.
Source: iMessage thread, January 20–23, 2017. (EFTA01617419–27)
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The conversation begins with a birthday greeting. The associate is flying in from Zurich. They arrange a brief meeting. Then the conversation shifts into something extraordinary: a career-planning session in which the associate maps out their professional options—and nearly every path runs through Epstein’s network.
The associate’s self-description is remarkable in its specificity. They describe themselves as a physician with experience at the UN, WHO, Gates Foundation, and World Bank. And then:
“Also my expertise is public health security. Pandemics (just did pandemic simulation) and threats to US health. That could be big platform.”
Pandemic simulation is being treated as a career credential—a professional asset to be leveraged for placement. Not a public safety exercise. Not an academic undertaking. A “platform” for career advancement, mentioned in the same breath as political access and institutional power.
The career options the associate then lists read like a map of the pandemic-preparedness industrial complex:
“Board partner at Biomatics Capital (Boris) but would mean I have to help him raise funds from BG.”
Biomatics Capital is Boris Nikolic’s venture fund. Nikolic—Gates’ chief science advisor, the same man cc’d on the 2011 vaccine emails, the same man who would later list “pandemic” as a DAF category—is here receiving personnel brokered through Epstein.
“BG office (for 6 months max) working on a series of messy agendas but as his senior science advisor.”
Gates’ private office—bgC3, the same entity that produced the “strain pandemic simulation” deliverable—is listed as a landing spot. Epstein’s role as gatekeeper is explicit. He later instructs: “Put together your resume… for my submission.”
“Join Merck team for 6–12 months in their vaccine team (big push for gardasil vaccine/HPV) would have to base in Rwanda.”
Merck’s vaccine team. Gardasil. A direct pipeline from Epstein’s phone to pharmaceutical vaccine operations.
“Join Swiss Re (reinsurance) team developing health products. Did one for pandemics, helped develop parametric trigger.”
This is perhaps the most structurally significant entry on the list. Swiss Re is one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies. A “parametric trigger” is an automated financial mechanism that pays out when a predefined threshold is crossed—in this case, a pandemic declaration. The associate is describing having helped develop a financial product that automatically generates payouts when a pandemic is declared. And Epstein’s network is the career placement vehicle.
The associate also mentions:
“Join the World Economic Forum as chief science advisor to Klaus Schwab.”
And:
“Join Martin Sorrell team and help develop media tech to understand and counteract international Gov’t fragility.”
The full list spans Gates’ office, Nikolic’s fund, Merck’s vaccine team, Swiss Re’s pandemic products, the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, MasterCard, and TPG Capital. Every major node in the pandemic-preparedness-to-profit pipeline appears on a single career menu—brokered through Jeffrey Epstein’s text messages.
And then the associate reveals how Gates himself fits into the calculus:
“BG… He hates mental health but he’s crazy about vaccines and autism stuff. That could be start to a more broad conversation.”
Gates’s interest in vaccines is described not as a philanthropic commitment but as a psychological lever for access. The associate frames vaccines and autism as the entry point—the hook—that will open the door to “a more broad conversation.” This is the same strategic logic Epstein used in 2011 when he insisted “additional money for vaccines must be included” in the JPMorgan presentation. Vaccines are not the mission. They are the key.
Epstein’s response to this sprawling career inventory? “BG.” Then: “No too broad.” Then: “Bg.” He steers his associate toward Gates. The associate acquiesces. Epstein instructs: “Put together your resume… for my submission.”
One further line from this thread demands attention. The day before, Epstein had texted: “Feel free to ask Bill if he would like a private meeting with Bannon, Thiel, or Barrack.” This was January 21, 2017—the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Epstein is offering to broker private meetings between Bill Gates and the incoming administration’s power center. The man who designed the donor-advised fund, who directed JPMorgan’s presentation strategy, who placed personnel into Gates’ office and Nikolic’s fund, is now offering to connect Gates to the White House.
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