Mechanism
Philanthropic steering
Private foundations directing public institutions through earmarked grants, conditions and placed personnel.
Information and Perception
Medicine and Public Health
- Finding MED-1.1
- Primary record Rockefeller money was committed to laboratory medicine before the Flexner Report, through the Rockefeller Institute in 1901 and the Sanitary Commission in 1909.
- Finding MED-1.2
- Primary record The AMA's Council on Medical Education started the Flexner study. The Carnegie Foundation paid for it and published it.
- Finding MED-1.5
- Primary record Rockefeller's General Education Board spent $94 million on 25 medical schools between 1913 and 1929, directed by Abraham Flexner and tied to a full-time clinical faculty.
- Finding MED-1.6
- Reported The General Education Board enforced its plan through contracts that required a school to return its endowment if it departed from the plan, and later through schools' need for further grants.
- Finding MED-1.7
- Reported Frederick Gates justified Rockefeller medical philanthropy in internal memos by worker productivity, control of physicians' fees, and social order.
- Finding MED-2.1
- Primary record From 1913 to 1951 the Rockefeller Foundation ran its own international health agency, which allocated over $94 million and started programs in more than 80 countries.
- Finding MED-2.2
- Peer-reviewed The Rockefeller Foundation was the lifeline of the League of Nations Health Organisation and eventually paid for almost half its personnel.
- Finding MED-2.4
- Peer-reviewed Many delegates at the 1946 conference that founded the WHO were Rockefeller fellows; a Rockefeller staff member ran its office for the Americas, and a former Rockefeller fellow led the WHO from 1953 to 1973.
- Finding MED-2.5
- Peer-reviewed The WHO's 1955 Global Malaria Eradication Programme followed the Rockefeller model of centrally directed single-disease eradication, and the Rockefeller Archive Center states that the Rockefeller international health division's legacy influenced it. The WHO abandoned its eradication goal in 1969.
- Finding MED-2.6
- Peer-reviewed In 1979, one year after the Alma-Ata declaration of "Health for All," a Rockefeller-sponsored conference at Bellagio took up selective primary health care, the narrower package that UNICEF adopted as GOBI.
- Finding MED-2.7
- Peer-reviewed The Gates Foundation gave the WHO $5.5 billion in 640 grants between 2000 and 2024. Every grant was earmarked, and 59 percent of the money went to polio.
- Finding MED-2.8
- Primary record The Gates Foundation launched Gavi with a $750 million pledge in 2000 and has taken equity stakes in mRNA vaccine developers, including BioNTech in September 2019.
War and Defense
Politics and Government
- Finding POL-7.18
- Primary record Frederick Gates's General Education Board paper "The Country School of To-Morrow" contains the phrase "our molding hand" on page 6 of the 1916 printing, in a passage he introduces as "a beautiful dream" of limitless resources. After the dream the essay proposes agricultural, domestic and civic training for rural children.