By Jared Evan

(JEWISH VOICE NEWS) The Justice Department’s massive release of Jeffrey Epstein records has detonated a fresh round of controversy—this time orbiting billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and secretive discussions about global pandemics years before COVID-19 upended the world.

Buried among roughly three million pages made public last Friday is a 2015 email tied to Epstein that references preparations for a “pandemic simulation,” complete with plans to loop in major international institutions. As Indonesian news group Tempo pointed out, the correspondence has fueled intense speculation about Gates’ behind-the-scenes interactions with the disgraced financier.

The email, dated March 20, 2015, carried the subject line “Preparing for Pandemics.” While the sender’s name was redacted, the message laid out a draft agenda for a pandemic preparedness meeting and proposed formally involving the World Health Organization and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

“As requested, I’m attaching a draft agenda for a pandemic preparedness meeting,” the sender wrote, adding that next steps should include coordination with WHO and the ICRC.

Russian newspaper Izvestia later reported that the Epstein files contain exchanges between Epstein and Gates touching on pandemic modeling and biomedical initiatives—sparking claims that the unidentified author of the 2015 email was Gates himself. According to that report, the email was originally sent to Gates in 2017 and subsequently forwarded to Epstein.

The discussion went far beyond abstract planning. It explored simulations of large-scale disease outbreaks, neurotechnology research, and scenarios involving the rapid global spread of infections—conversations that, as observers now note, took place years before COVID-19 emerged.

Those revelations have renewed scrutiny of Event 201, a high-profile global pandemic exercise sponsored in October 2019 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alongside Johns Hopkins’ Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum. The exercise simulated a fictional viral outbreak to test worldwide readiness. The Gates Foundation has repeatedly stressed that Event 201 was strictly a preparedness drill, not a prediction or rehearsal for a real pandemic.

For years, the foundation has poured money into public-health initiatives, including vaccine research and partnerships with government regulators. But the Epstein files complicate that narrative, reviving uncomfortable questions about Gates’ association with the convicted sex offender.

Epstein, who died in a U.S. jail in 2019, also claimed in emails that Gates had asked him to obtain antibiotics that could be secretly given to Melinda Gates, then his wife. In another message, Epstein boasted to former UK ambassador Peter Mandelson that he was “having a great time” with Gates during a visit to Seattle.

The newly released documents also include previously unseen photographs of Epstein and Gates together. Gates has not commented on the latest claims, though he acknowledged in a 2021 CNN interview with Anderson Cooper that his relationship with Epstein was a “huge mistake.” He said he met Epstein a handful of times, hoping—unsuccessfully—to secure donations for philanthropic causes.

That relationship, which began around 2011 after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting an underage girl, reportedly played a role in Melinda French Gates’ decision to file for divorce. In a rambling 2013 email riddled with typos, Epstein claimed he had resigned from roles connected to the Gates Foundation and BG3, a Gates-founded think tank, because his involvement had become “the middle of a very serious marital dispute between Melinda and Bill.”

Epstein went even further, alleging he had been asked by Gates to participate in activities “which ranged from the inappropriate to the immoral to the illegal”—a claim that remains unproven but now sits, starkly, in the public record.

As more eyes comb through the Epstein trove, the fallout is far from over—and the shadow cast by those old emails is only growing darker.