In September 2019, less than a month before COVID began circulating, the Gates Foundation made a $55 million pre-IPO equity investment in BioNTech. The company also had never brought a single product to market.120 Soon afterward, the German government followed Gates with a $445 million infusion into BioNTech.121 On July 21, 2020, when Robert Kadlec committed Operation Warp Speed to a $2 billion purchase of 100 million doses of BioNTech/Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine,122 the company’s stock value soared, with Bill Gates’s equity shares increasing to an evaluation of $1.1 billion.
