‘Muzzled and Muted’: Epstein, Gates Financed Research Portal to Control Scientific Discourse
They’re betting you won’t connect the dots.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
In a series of posts on X, ScienceGuardians revealed that Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates and others linked to the Gates Foundation were instrumental in financing ResearchGate, an online scientific research portal. According to ScienceGuardians, the platform was actually developed “as a for-profit business to make big money from science” — with the intent to “control the flow of scientific ideas.”
Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates sought to profit from — and exert influence over — scientific publishing and online discourse, according to information in the “Epstein Files” released last month by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In a series of posts on X, ScienceGuardians revealed that Epstein, Gates and figures linked to the Gates Foundation were instrumental in financing ResearchGate, an online scientific research portal.
The Epstein Files contain a “fund summary” published in 2014 by Biosys Capital Partners. The report lists companies “at the intersection of medicine, life sciences and digital technology” that it considered attractive investment targets.
The summary listed ResearchGate, noting that Gates provided $10 million in funding to ResearchGate in 2013. This was part of a Gates-led funding round that attracted $35 million in investments to ResearchGate.
The fund summary stated that ResearchGate aimed to “connect searchers and scientists … to share, discover, use, and distribute findings.”
But according to ScienceGuardians, the platform was actually developed “as a for-profit business to make big money from science” — with the intent to “control the flow of scientific ideas” and exert influence over scientific discourse.
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., senior research scientist for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), said Gates’ 2013 investment in ResearchGate was part of a wave of investments during that period in online platforms. He said investors like Gates recognized the influence they could exert over those platforms’ algorithms.
“In 2013, the monetization of social groupings was all the rage, so maybe Gates’ investment was purely for menial ad-click and headhunter revenue,” Jablonowski said. “However, the power to direct the consolidated minds of the future of science is way more lucrative. It is the power to write the algorithms.”
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead, whose research was censored by scientific journals, said Gates’ funding of ResearchGate “can affect the priorities of the platform, with more emphasis being placed on features aligned with global health and vaccines.”
“Gates could advocate weighting criteria that favor large-scale, pharma/biotech clinical trials over smaller observational studies focused on prevention and health promotion via lifestyle and non-patentable strategies,” Mead said.
Gates, Epstein helped attract Big Pharma, key journals to ResearchGate
Gates and Epstein helped attract investors and advertisers — including Big Pharma — to ResearchGate, promising healthy returns.
The 2014 Biosys fund summary lists the firm’s managing partner as Boris Nikolic, Gates’ chief science and technology adviser. Included in the Epstein Files is an August 2013 agreement between Gates and Epstein, in which Gates requested that Epstein “personally serve” as Nikolic’s representative.
According to a September 2013 document, Nikolic stood to gain between $2.5 and $100 million — contingent on how much ResearchGate’s value increased. This created “huge motivation” to hype up ResearchGate, ScienceGuardians wrote.
In 2017, Gates participated in a new funding round for ResearchGate that garnered $52.6 million in investments.
Investors included Goldman Sachs and the Wellcome Trust, led by Jeremy Farrar, Ph.D., architect of key COVID-19 pandemic-era policies and now assistant director-general of the World Health Organization.
“Epstein was in the loop,” ScienceGuardians wrote. In a series of emails between Nikolic and Epstein in 2014, the two discussed insider information about ResearchGate and ways to hype up the platform. To attract Epstein’s support, Nikolic sent him positive press reviews of ResearchGate.
These efforts appear to have succeeded. Included in the Epstein Files is a 2013 ResearchGate business plan that lists several pharmaceutical and health technology companies, including Roche and General Electric, as advertisers.
Gates and Epstein also helped secure partnerships with the publishers of major scientific journals, including Nature. Published by Springer Nature, it is widely considered one of the “giants” of medical and scientific publishing.
Other Springer publications include Politico, Springer Health, Nature, BioMedCentral, Scientific American and Nature Medicine — publisher of the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper in 2020, used to support the claim that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin.
“Proximal Origin” was used to discredit proponents of the “lab-leak” theory of COVID-19’s origin. Government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and mainstream media outlets widely cited the paper, which has not been retracted.
Last year, the Trump administration launched an investigation against Nature Medicine’s publisher, examining whether the journal allowed Fauci and other public health officials to influence the paper’s conclusions in exchange for funding.
‘When we needed them the most, free-thinking scientists were scarce’
According to ScienceGuardians, traditional scientific publishers initially opposed ResearchGate’s influence — before opting to collaborate with the platform.
“ResearchGate owns the ‘end flow’: After publication, users upload millions of full PDFs … letting anyone read papers for free and bypassing expensive paywalls,” ScienceGuardians wrote.
Several scientific publishers sued ResearchGate, but settled in 2023 with a “solution to support researchers.” Some of the publishers have since developed partnerships with ResearchGate, including agreements with Springer Nature and Cambridge University Press.
“Bottom line: When a platform controls how research is actually seen and shared at massive scale, publishers have to play ball — partner, compromise, or lose traffic/relevance,” ScienceGuardians wrote. “Whoever owns ResearchGate … can quietly pressure the gatekeepers themselves.”
Some researchers have accused Springer journals of rejecting or retracting papers that question prevailing narratives on the COVID-19 pandemic. Jablonowski said such censorship helped stifle scientific discourse:
“In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we needed them the most, free-thinking scientists were scarce. Face masks, elbow bumps, social distancing and experimental gene therapy rebranded as vaccines were in vogue, and the discourse was suppressed, deplatformed and vilified. Inadequately safety tested childhood vaccines … exploded in popularity.
“The scientific discourse was muzzled and muted. Without discourse, there is no science, no answers and no justifications.”
Gates, Epstein sought algorithmic control over scientific discourse
According to ScienceGuardians, scientific censorship can be achieved not just by retracting or rejecting papers, but through control over algorithms that determine which papers can attain wide visibility — and which cannot.
“Why would billionaires like Gates & Epstein crave this kind of power? Owning a hub like ResearchGate lets them shape what research explodes into the spotlight — and what quietly fades away,” ScienceGuardians wrote.
Mead agreed. “The most insidious direct impact on this exposure aspect could be on algorithmic choices … what gets recommended or highlighted — that is, which fields or topics gain more online visibility without suppressing others outright. It’s a subtle form of narrative control.”
Peer-reviewed research published in 2022 found that researchers faced “a wide variety of censorship and suppression tactics during the COVID-19 pandemic, “due to their critical and unorthodox positions on COVID-19.” These tactics included “retraction of scientific papers after publication.”
A 2023 book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,” criticized the influence of figures like Gates in scientific publishing. A 2024 book review — published in Nature — stated the dispersal of these funds is being “driven mainly by the personal interests of a handful of super-rich individuals.”
“It’s not heavy-handed censorship — it’s subtle, invisible steering of ideas, trends, and ‘truths,’” ScienceGuardians wrote.
Jablonowski agreed. “Algorithmic control is authoritarian control, and largely without accountability.” He compared it to pandemic-era Big Tech censorship.
“With a few tweaks to the algorithms, Facebook and Google were able to direct and control the information most Americans consumed during the pandemic: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. — from which CHD was either banned or shadow-banned,” Jablonowski said.
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