Leaked internal minutes show the world’s largest vaccine-financing alliance commissioning campaign work from the group that produced the Disinformation Dozen. The arrangement appears in neither organisation’s public filings.
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On January 8, 2024, eleven staff of the Center for Countering Digital Hate held their monthly portfolio planning meeting. Item 36 on the agenda was listed as “GAVI/roundtables — Sarah.”
The minute for that item, recorded in the organiation’s own internal notes, reads that they had told GAVI they would do roundtables — one to three of them before March — bringing public health figures back into CCDH’s public accountability asks. The stated reason: “anti-vaxx” had fallen off the radar for many people, so it needed bringing back. A staff member named Eli was to lead on it upon returning.
Six weeks later, the roundtables were running. The minutes of the February 19, 2024 meeting, under the policy and partnerships section, record: GAVI roundtable, first one on Wednesday that week.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is not a small player. Launched at Davos in January 2000 as a partnership of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it says it has helped immunise well over a billion children and reaches more than half the world’s children with vaccines against roughly twenty diseases. It receives sovereign funding, including from the United States.
CCDH is a parastatal, British/US intelligence cutout organisation best known in America for a March 2021 report naming twelve people it called the Disinformation Dozen — a list subsequently cited in a US Surgeon General’s advisory and in a White House press briefing, and one that Meta publicly disputed on the merits before acting on it anyway.
The minutes show one commissioning campaign activity from the other. Neither has disclosed it.
Not an isolated arrangement
The same meeting records a second outside body in a similar posture.
Under the MSI item, Callum Hood describes a project underway in Ghana and Mexico — in the minutes’ shorthand, anti-abortion imperialism, an insight into how some Western organisations might be pushing misinformation into developing nations. Imran Ahmed responds that there is substantial opportunity for CCDH in funding and civil society relationships, calling it significant for support in the Global South and for sexual and reproductive rights.
MSI Reproductive Choices — formerly Marie Stopes International — is one of the world’s largest abortion providers, and the organization on whose behalf the research was being conducted.
Then, in the minutes of March 18, 2024: the MSI report’s introduction and recommendations still needed sign-off, and MSI had signed off on the recommendations.
The subject-commissioner of a piece of research approving its policy recommendations before publication is a methodological problem regardless of anyone’s politics. It is the kind of arrangement that, disclosed, would carry a conflict-of-interest note in any journal. Here it is recorded as a routine scheduling update.
The March 18 minutes go on to discuss where to push the MSI findings — the EU and UN rather than US policymakers, possibly USAID and development organisations, with a staffer to approach women’s health contacts at the State Department and the White House Gender Policy Council
The pattern extends beyond global health financing. My earlier reporting, CCDH Wrote the Government’s Script, documents a structurally similar arrangement between CCDH and the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology — where CCDH proposed roundtable agenda language that reportedly appeared verbatim in the minister’s official briefing.
What is not in the record
Gavi does not appear as a related organization, funder, or transaction partner on CCDH’s IRS Schedule R. MSI does not appear either. The relationships exist, on the documentary record, only inside CCDH’s own operational minutes.
This gap sits inside a larger pattern. My earlier analysis of CCDH’s IRS filings, Follow the Money: What CCDH’s Own Tax Returns Reveal, traces CCDH’s Schedule B donor anonymity and its broader dark-money funding architecture — the financial context this operational record sits inside.
That is the finding. Not that a conspiracy was hatched, but that two large international organisations — one of them funded by sovereign governments including the United States — engaged a campaigning group’s services in ways that neither side has ever disclosed, and that in one case the commissioning body signed off on the recommendations directed at policymakers.
Why this is not a minor disclosure gap
Gavi is not an outside funder standing apart from the vaccine industry it finances. By its own description, it is an alliance of five partner categories: sovereign governments — including the United Kingdom and United States — the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the vaccine industry itself, anchored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gavi’s own chief executive, Seth Berkley, has put it plainly: “It’s an alliance, it’s not an organisation — we bring together WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank, private sector drug companies all to work together.”
Berkley himself appears in the federal Epstein record: the 2011 Gates–JPMorgan offshore vaccine fund proposal listed him as a proposed committee member. That architecture — and the flow of Gates Foundation and Open Society money into the very organisations that later enforced the prohibition on discussing it — is documented in The Real Pandemic Profiteers.
That is the frame the January 2024 commission belongs in. An alliance that structurally includes vaccine manufacturers, sovereign donor governments, and philanthropic capital committed a UK campaigning organisation to revive public pressure on the people most associated with questioning vaccine safety — in an arrangement that shows up in neither organisation’s disclosures. Whatever one thinks about vaccines, an institution built around expanding their use quietly outsourcing accountability campaigns against the people who question that use is the kind of conflict of interest that would draw scrutiny in any other regulated industry.
The target category named in the minutes — “public health figures,” “anti vaxx” — is the same category CCDH’s most consequential public campaign was already built around. The March 2021 Disinformation Dozen report named twelve individuals as primary targets for platform deplatforming and advertiser pressure, including this author. The roundtable minutes do not name individuals. But they were commissioned into an organisation that already had that list in place, not into a neutral research body starting from zero.
How much that list was worth as research is no longer a matter of inference. In newly surfaced remarks, Meta’s Aaron Berman — a former CIA analyst who ran the company’s misinformation policy — states that Facebook did not accept CCDH’s central claim, and puts the volume of such content at a fraction of one percent of what users saw. Facebook removed pages, groups and accounts belonging to the named individuals anyway.
That is the organization Gavi commissioned in January 2024 to bring public accountability pressure back onto the same category of people: one whose defining product its own largest platform partner had rejected on the merits while acting on it regardless. In 2021, CCDH chief executive Imran Ahmed appeared before Parliament and compared the Americans on the list to "groomers" — an analogy to child sexual exploitation, delivered in the one venue in the Anglo-American system where it carried no defamation liability.
This is a narrower and more defensible claim than “the vaccine industry ordered an attack on RFK.” It does not require that leap. It only requires reading Gavi’s own description of itself, and comparing it against what its own alliance partner’s UK-based campaigning arm recorded doing on its behalf.
The RFK item, stated precisely
The January 8 meeting also contains the line that has drawn most of the attention since the minutes leaked to Paul Thacker and Matt Taibbi in October 2024.
During a long discussion of how CCDH might intervene in a year of major elections — monetisation, AI deepfakes, harassment of female candidates — Ahmed’s final recorded comment is that black ops were being set up to look at RFK, that there was nervousness about his impact on the election, and that CCDH might be asked to comment, particularly from antivaxx.
The construction is passive. Ahmed says black ops were "being set up" — he does not say by whom, and the minutes do not resolve it in either direction.
Which is not a small thing to leave unresolved. Whoever was setting them up, the chief executive of a registered charity knew that black operations were being organised against a candidate for the American presidency, recorded it in the monthly planning minutes between an item on advertising and an item on regulatory strategy, and treated it as an opportunity to be positioned for rather than an alarm to be raised. He did not ask in the minutes who was behind it. He did not treat it as something to be disclosed or refused. The passive voice is doing a great deal of work here — but the note-taker's calm is doing more. This was ordinary business.
The sequence, without the causation
In 2025 and 2026, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. froze and then conditioned $600 million in appropriated US funding to Gavi over vaccine safety concerns. On July 29, 2026, the State Department agreed to release the funds, with future support reportedly contingent on Gavi meeting benchmarks on vaccine safety.
Resist it — as narrative. The document names neither Kennedy in the Gavi item nor Gavi in the Kennedy item. The connection it records is categorical: a commission aimed at "anti-vaxx" public figures, placed with the organisation that had already named them.
What can be said is narrower and still worth saying. In January 2024 Gavi commissioned campaign work intended to revive pressure (historically, quite defamatory) on vaccine-safety voices, at a moment when the most prominent such voice in American politics was running for president. Two years later that person held regulatory authority over Gavi’s American funding. Those are facts in sequence. Whether they are anything more is not established by these documents.
One more thing in the standing text
Every meeting record in the file, from January through June 2024, carries the same box of annual priorities in its header. The first entry, on all of them, is “Kill Musk’s Twitter.”
Previous coverage treated that phrase as a striking one-off. It is not. It is standing organisational policy, reproduced unchanged at the top of every monthly planning document across at least six months, alongside advertising focus, triggering EU and UK regulatory action, and progress in the USA.
An organisation whose formal, recurring annual objective is the destruction of a specific communications platform is not a neutral research body, whatever else it is. That is visible on the face of its own template.
Notes on sourcing
All quotations and paraphrases above are drawn from CCDH internal portfolio planning meeting minutes for January 8, February 19, March 5, March 18, April 15, May 23 and June 10, 2024, leaked to Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi and published via The Disinformation Chronicle in October 2024.
Unbelievable that they're b back to their deceitful work after being exposed. Keep shining the light on them and their tactics, Sayer Ji. Prayers and confidence that truth wins in the end.
I have written much about GAVI in the past: they formed a formal alliance with the British (Cameron) gov in 2011 with the British gov donating initially £1b. In 2017 they launched a campaign through the Spectator to ban anti-vaxxers (in effect all critical comment on vaccination) from Social Media. In 2020 the had a big fundraiser with Boris Johnson for the development and distribution of Covid vaccination in which Johnson acclaimed GAVI “the new NATO” in an an event which was largely hidden from the British public. Johnson has always indulged in exceptionally crude rhetoric about “ant-vaxxers” even as if he was paid to do it. Of course, Bill Gates is a conspicuous presence in all this. Could the international footing of GAVI be the reason why CCHD were chosen to invade the US rather than using a homegrown disinformation brand?