Columbia University's Public Health School and NYC's `Corona-Gates' Scandal: Part 6

Columbia U.'s Public Health School: Also funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Columbia U. School of Public Health’s Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Connection

Besides receiving millions of dollars in “charitable grant” money since 1998 from the Mailman Foundation and the Gates Foundation, Columbia University and its Mailman School of Public Health has also received a lot of “charitable grant” money from the Robert Wood Johnson [RWJ] Foundation.

With assets then exceeding $9.6 billion, RWJ was the fifth–largest U.S. foundation in 2017; and, as long ago as 1980, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation controlled about 20 percent of the stock of the New Brunswick, New Jersey-based Johnson & Johnson for-profit Big Pharma corporation, that had “a long history of secrecy” and preferred “to keep as low a profile as is humanly possible,” according to the 1980 edition of the Everybody’s Business Almanac: An Irreverent Guide To Corporate America. The same 1980 book also noted that “the Johnson Foundation funds programs in health care, thereby giving money,” coincidentally, “to institutions such as hospitals that are good J & J customers.”

But on July 30, 2008 the RWJ Foundation also gave a “charitable grant” of $4,446,132 to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism because “this project will brand the Columbia effort as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Program in Health and Science Journalism thus promoting our influence with health and health care journalists,” according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website. And between 2011 and 2013, three additional “charitable grants,” totaling over $3.6 million, were given to Columbia University by the RWJ Foundation.

Then, in 2014, yet another RWJ “charitable grant” of $1,465,000 was given to Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

In 2020, New York City’s public health system apparently also had not been adequately prepared during the 21st-century by the administrations of either former NYC Mayor Bloomberg or current NYC Mayor De Blasio to provide effective medical care and treatment medication for the more than 22,000 New York City residents,  many with underlying health conditions or living in local nursing homes, who are estimated to have died after contracting COVID-19. Yet according to a press release, headlined “Health Policy Insiders Reveal Details Of The Data-Driven Process Behind The City’s Public Health Successes; Approach Can Be A Model For Other Cities,” about the results of a RWJ Foundation-funded “research study” at Columbia‘s Mailman School of Public Health that was posted on the school’s website on Dec. 19, 2013, academic researchers there then claimed:

“As Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s term comes to a close, the latest research conducted by the Mailman School of Public Health indicates that he leaves a legacy of ambitious public health policies…that have improved the health and increased the life expectancy of New Yorkers. The paper takes a behind-the-scenes look at the Bloomberg Administration to evaluate the evidence and build public support for improving health in the city—which also can serve as a blueprint for health policy in cities across the country…Support for the study was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.” (end of part 6)