Gates Foundation’s Gavin Yamey Exposed as Another Academic Fanatic Spreading Falsehoods, Once Again

At some point, doesn’t Bill Gates need to cut off Yamey's money?

5 minute read

In a long expose last year I unmasked a handful of political zealots behind a years-long crusade to smear Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who had just been nominated to run the National Institutes of Health. These Democratic Party activists campaigned alongside Tony Fauci and included Yale University’s Gregg Gonsalves, Duke University’s Gavin Yamey, and Wayne State University’s David Gorski. (For those who have never heard of Wayne State, it’s a university in Detroit, internationally acclaimed as the “Harvard of Michigan.”)

None of the trio has ever published a medical paper worth a second glance, nor have they accomplished anything in public health meriting more than a university press release. Instead, all three use their academic titles to compete for both liberal journalists’ attention and renown amongst online leftist militants.

In that second competition, Gavin Yamey has seized the winning trophy. This underlines why Yamey’s career is a case study to explain the plummeting trust for public health. People view academic medicine and public health as rife with ideologues co-splaying as data-driven medical geeks, and they do so for good reason.

Shortly after Cole Tomas Allen stormed past security at the White House Correspondents’ dinner to murder President Trump, people began scanning social media to figure out how a guy, whose friends described as a nerdy gaming enthusiast, became radicalized into a rageful ideological nutter. Digging through the leftist social media app Bluesky, online investigators discovered that Allen ran the @coldforce.bsky.social account where he amplified posts of rabid militants.

And who was one of the extremists captivating Allen as he prepared himself mentally over the last several months to assassinate Trump? Duke University’s Gavin Yamey.

CNN reported that Allen shared posts by extremists who compared President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and that he encouraged Trump’s critics to purchase guns: “Suspected shooter’s social media posts show shift from video games to political rage.”

Here’s what CNN reported on Allen’s Bluesky account where he promoted fanatics:

Allen appears to have started posting on the Bluesky social media platform in February 2025, a few weeks into Trump’s second term. That account frequently criticized the Trump administration’s policies and lamented that more powerful figures weren’t taking action against the president.

“Everyone already knows trump is a f**king awful person in multiple dimensions and no one has done sh*t,” the “coldforce” account wrote in April 2025.

Yamey did not respond to multiple requests for comment asking why he thinks the man charged with attempting to assassinate the President was a fan of his social media activity. But when others were confronted with this same question they lashed out.

On the Piers Morgan Show, Democratic Party activist “Jo Jo from Jerz” freaked when she discovered Cole Tomas Allen was a fan of hers and retweeted her social media posts.

When not posting extremist rhetoric on social media, Yamey has distinguished himself with a barrage of hate assaults against anyone calling to cut ties to the WHO and Bill Gates, without mentioning that he, Gavin Yamey, is swimming in WHO and Bill Gates money.

Back in 20007, the Gates Foundation donated $1.1 million to launch the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, with Gavin Yamey as one of the senior editors. For a guy with questionable ethics, Yamey nonetheless had the gall to implore researchers to follow proper ethics. “Please help us in our mission by following our guidance on ethics and reporting standards,” Yamey warned, in an editorial.

In 2009, the Kaiser Family Mini-Media Fellowship in Global Health Reporting awarded Yamey a grant to examine healthcare in Africa. Quite a bit of the money for this program came from historical donations from Gates, Kaiser has disclosed.

In 2016, the Gates Foundation gave Duke University a $900K grant with Yamey as co-investigator. With this cash, Gates charged Yamey with developing policies that align with health goals of the United Nations and the Chinese government’s “Healthy China 2030.”

Not that Gates’s money has improved world health. In a remarkable series published in The Nation, reporter Tim Schwab documented in exhaustive detail how Bill Gates funding for academics and public health both enriches himself (“Bill Gates Gives to the Rich, Including Himself”) and does little for public health (“Are Bill Gates’s Billions Distorting Public Health Data?”).

Nonetheless, Since Gates began handing him that money, Yamey has transformed his academic position into an online Bill Gates lobbying campaign. Yamey promoted Gates with little regard for ethical consideration in an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine and has served as the resident Bill Gates expert for several news articles appearing in The BMJ, run by his friend Kamran Abassi.

Buried in a journal article, I discovered Yamey’s funding. I was not startled to find oodles of Gates grants (red) as well as some United Nations (yellow) and World Health Organization-WHO loot to boot (blue).

Nor was I surprised to find that, when NPR needed dial-a-quote expertise last January to berate the Trump administration for withdrawing from the WHO, Yamey appeared like magic in the news piece (which did not disclose Yamey’s Gates and WHO funding, of course).

During a talk he gave at Harvard’s Global Health Institute, Tim Schwab explained the ethical swamp of Bill Gates funding for academics and why you see a Gavin Yamey type popping up in a news story to defend the WHO or Bill Gates, without learning that Gates pays Gavin Yamey.

“The Gates Foundation in recent years has become the second largest funder of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is part of the United Nations and is ostensibly organized as a democratic organization,” said Schwab. “But then you also have a private billionaire from Seattle who can come into the sidelines with billions of dollars in donations and shape what the WHO works on and what it doesn’t work on.”

I emailed Yamey multiple times, inquiring how much Gates money he has received over the years, and how much of that Gates lucre goes into his own pocket. Oddly enough, asking Yamey about Gates money has caused Yamey to go silent about Gates.

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If you’d like more background on the ethics at Gavin Yamey’s Duke University, see this piece I did on Dr. Ralph Snyderman, who was dean of Duke’s medical school. Snyderman was named multiple times in a state criminal complaints for helping Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family addict Americans to Oxycontin.

When a grad student figured this out, Snyderman then threatened him with legal action. Like Gavin Yamey, Ralph Snyderman remains a member of Duke’s faculty in good standing. Because of course.