The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been repeatedly criticized for its “revolving door of pay to play politics,” especially when it comes to working with billionaire Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.

So far, ten of the past 11 FDA commissioners left the agency to secure roles with large pharmaceutical companies they once regulated.

The mode of operation for the Gates Foundation, in addition to Big Pharma as a whole, is to hire high-ranking members of the FDA, who come aboard with intimate knowledge of the regulatory process.

Murray Lumpkin, senior advisor to the FDA commissioner for 24-years, specialized in global issues.

Today, he is deputy director of regulatory affairs at the Gates Foundation and a signatory on the 2017 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the FDA and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

A purpose of this MOU is to share information to “facilitate the development of innovative products, including medical countermeasures,” such as diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, to combat disease transmission during a pandemic.

While the FDA has MOUs with many academic and non-profit organizations, few have as much to gain as Gates, who has invested billions into pandemic countermeasures.

Millions of Americans have become aware and concerned that the Gates Foundation has undue influence over the FDA’s regulatory decisions of these countermeasures.

David Gortler, an ex-senior adviser to the FDA commissioner between 2019 and 2021, says he is “suspicious” of the MOU.

“If the Gates Foundation establishes an MOU with a regulator on a product they want to develop, it seems like it would be a conflict of interest. What if every other drug company did the exact same thing as the Gates Foundation?” he says.

Gortler, now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., explained that normally, meetings between developers and regulators are an official part of the public record and subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.

“However, an MOU such as this can circumvent the usual requirements for the transparency of official communications,” says Gortler. “This way their communications can be kept secret.”

David Bell, a former medical officer for the World Health Organization (WHO) who now works as a public health physician and biotech consultant, agrees that the MOU has the potential to corrupt the regulatory process.

“The narrative is that philanthropic foundations can only be good because they’re making vaccines and saving thousands of lives, so we need to cut the red tape and help the FDA get stuff done quickly otherwise children will die,” Bell said. “But in reality, it has potential to corrupt the whole system.”

“Speaking generally, close relationships between regulators and developers raise inevitable risks that shortcuts and favors will break down the rigorousness of the product review, putting the public at risk,” Bell explained.

Recently, the Children’s Health Defense revealed that in September 2019, “just prior to the pandemic, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings showed the foundation purchased over 1 million shares in BioNTech (Pfizer’s partner) for $18.10 per share. By November 2021, the foundation dumped most of the stock for an average of $300 per share.”

“Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtel reported the foundation pocketed approximately $260 million in profit — more than 15 times its original investment — most of it untaxed because it was invested through the foundation.”

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