Angela Merkel has said Bill Gates used the scale of his foundation’s fortune to put “moral pressure” on governments over vaccination funding and that he told African leaders when Germany was being “stingy”.
The former chancellor spoke in a special edition of the Handelsblatt podcast Meckel & Matthes, recorded last week and now widely clipped in German and Austrian media.
She was answering a question about when she first grasped the political power of private wealth.
It was not the present argument over algorithms, she said, but Gates and the then Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Gate’s money was not only used for silent donations, but also to wield political power and influence.
The money was large enough, Merkel said, that heads of government received him “at least as warmly” as they received the German chancellor.
An unelected billionaire was, in her telling, on level terms with elected leaders. “And he then had the strength, so to speak, to exert moral pressure through money.”
Merkel recalled that “If we didn’t give enough, we were immediately in a bad position.”
The concrete case she referred to was the international vaccine alliance.
If Berlin, in the foundation’s view, put up too little, Germany looked bad.
Gates, she said, would tell African presidents: “Merkel was stingy this year.”
“And with that he had acquired great power”, she realised.
She added that the foundation narrowed itself to a few fields, “for example vaccination”.
She asked Gates whether his foundation would not like to invest more in education, for example. Gates then explained to her that results were much more difficult to measure there.
During the Corona era, the Gates Foundation collaborated with key organisations of the global health architecture and collected extensive funding for worldwide health and vaccine initiatives.
The foundation dropped “Bill & Melinda” and rebranded as the Gates Foundation after their 2021 divorce and Melinda French Gates’s exit as co-chair, a split attributed to Bill Gates close ties with the convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
🇬🇧🇺🇸Remarkable confession from Angela Merkel: Bill Gates pressured her to promote his vaccine business. She was afraid for her reputation and would have preferred to promote education instead of vaccines.
Link (MSM): https://t.co/QWM7G8zSXn@FatEmperor @naomirwolf @AlexBerenson pic.twitter.com/LJibXb5YqC
— Stefan Homburg (@SHomburg) September 16, 2026
