Germany Has Partnered With Gates Foundation to Tune of Billions Of Euros

The headline of a recent LifeSiteNews article declared that the “German Government funds several Gates Foundation projects to the tune of 3.8 million euros”. This is a somewhat curious revelation, but not surprisingly, given the relatively paltry sum, it did not inspire more than a flurry of interest on social media. In fact, the actual total cited in the German source for the article is not €3.8 million, but €3.8 billion.

Furthermore, although the correct sum is far more imposing, it needs to be stressed that the funding in question is not in fact funding of Gates Foundation projects or programmes per se, but rather German co-funding of projects or programmes in which the Gates Foundation is also involved.

LifeSiteNews eventually corrected the erroneous figure in its headline, but only after several days, by which time the initial buzz had passed. Although the preview has updated, the confusion is still apparent in the below tweet by the article’s author. This is particularly odd given that the author is Austrian and hence surely knows that Milliarden, the figure cited in the German source for the article, is billions, not millions. Furthermore, the correct figure was cited in the body of the text, if albeit with an erroneous conversion into millions, rather than billions of dollars.

This is massive and very few people are reporting on it:

German gov’t funds several Gates Foundation projects to the tune of 3.8 million euros, a parliamentary inquiry revealed.https://t.co/6Knt9rfjd8

Thanks to @transparenztest and @TOysmueller for drawing attention to this

— Andreas Wailzer (@Andreas_Wailzer) August 3, 2023

The source is an article on the German website Transparenztest (Transparency Test), which in turn cites funding data furnished by the German Government itself in a June 29th written response to a parliamentary query on German cooperation with private foundations.

Transparenztest calculated the €3.8 billion total based on German Government data. This total includes both funding for joint German Government/Gates Foundation projects and non-project-linked German contributions to programmes. Unfortunately, however, Transparenztest has misconstrued the nature of the latter funding.