Philanthropy’s Failed Covid Test

In the early days of the Covid-19 crisis, there was a lot of talk that it represented a “test” for philanthropy.

If that framing was particularly prominent, it was in part because it met a certain psychological need. For at least the last decade, public attitudes toward philanthropy have been characterized by an unsatisfying indefiniteness, as celebratory responses have been countered by a surge of more critical ones. A test in a moment of crisis, on the other hand, holds out the promise of definitive resolution, revealing the true nature of those confronting it.

A year after the pandemic struck the United States, Vox’s Teddy Schleifer revisited the theme of the pandemic as a test for philanthropy. But looking back, he couldn’t find an emerging narrative that offered a definitive interpretation one way or the other.

“Billionaire philanthropy faced its biggest testing moment to date at the outset of the pandemic. Would the billionaires save us?” he asked. His answer: “It’s hard to say.” Each side could marshal evidence for either vindication or rebuke, as “proponents and critics of big-money philanthropy gravitate toward their prior beliefs.” Assessing their contending cases, he concluded, “Both sides have a point.”

Schleifer put his finger on an important dynamic: the lack of a clear consensus regarding how to assess philanthropy’s response to the pandemic.

Three main factors help explain that uncertainty. One stems from the fact that you get very different test results if you judge a massive gift by its absolute size than if you judge it by its size relative to the fortune it derived from. Another is linked to questions about the length of time the test should cover: Should it be based on the crisis itself, or must it consider the periods that preceded the crisis and followed it as well?

The third involves clashes over how to judge philanthropy’s role in the research, manufacture, and distribution of Covid vaccines, in light of broader debates about the legitimacy of philanthro-capitalism.

In the years ahead, when it comes time to survey the ways in which the pandemic shaped attitudes toward philanthropy, this lack of a conclusive verdict may turn out to be one of the crisis’s defining legacies. For all the disruption it has caused, it is unlikely that the pandemic will significantly disrupt the pre-existing contests between philanthropy critics and defenders or radically alter public opinion regarding mega-donations. To the extent that crises hold out the possibility of delivering definitive vindication or condemnation, when it comes to philanthropy, the Covid crisis represents a failed test.

Scale and Sacrifice

In recent decades, as fantastic fortunes have concentrated in the hands of the nation’s wealthiest men and women, they’ve led to donations of an unprecedented size that happen to represent a relatively small proportion of the donor’s net worth.

A Washington Post investigation in June 2020 illuminated this development, noting that the “pandemic is testing the generosity of billionaires.” It analyzed the pandemic-related giving of the nation’s 50 richest people and families and determined that their publicly announced donations amounted to about $1 billion, “which sounds like a lot of money but adds up to less than 0.1 percent of their combined wealth.”

Public discourse about large-scale philanthropy is dominated by gifts that sound like a lot of money and so trigger accolades, but that at the same time also call out the fact that the donors could have given much, much more, and so invite rebuke.

This dynamic was reinforced by the widely reported fact that, at least in terms of bottom lines, the pandemic has been very good for the wealthiest Americans.

In March, according to Bloomberg News, the Federal Reserve announced that the top 1 percent “saw their net worth rise by about $4 trillion in 2020, capturing more than a third of all new wealth.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently put this growth in historical context, noting that “a third of U.S. billionaires’ wealth gains since 1990 have come during the pandemic.” And much as the pandemic was a global phenomenon, so, too, is this concentration of wealth. Bloomberg News noted that the “500 wealthiest people in the world saw their net worth increase by almost one-third in 2020.”

As many commentators have noted, those figures complicate an assessment of the giving of even the most celebrated donor during the pandemic: MacKenzie Scott.

Scott gave away some $5.8 billion last year to pandemic-related causes, perhaps more than any other individual has given away to working charities in a single year, but because Amazon stock shot up by more than 60 percent, she’s worth “almost 50 percent more than a year ago,” as Forbes recently pointed out.

Should the fact that Scott is considerably richer than when the pandemic began determine the marks she receives for her giving during it? Of course, it’s not just Scott and it’s not just the pandemic. Over the last several decades, there have been precious few billionaires who have given away money faster than they made it, and that includes most signatories of the Giving Pledge. Plus, many of the sharpest critiques of philanthropy hinge on the charge that it strengthens, as opposed to weakens, the giver’s status and power. We should be used to, if not entirely comfortable with, the reality of mega-gifts springing out of surging bank accounts.

J(Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance, Getty Images

But large-scale crises tend to stoke demands for shared sacrifice, and so there’s something especially uncomfortable about the phenomenon of a global pandemic in which so many have suffered economically providing a small handful of others with opportunities for tremendous private profit.

And yet, despite that discomfort, there’s also no shared understanding of what the precise levels of giving might be that definitively signify philanthropic sacrifice for mega-donors during a protracted crisis. Do the wealthy have to become less wealthy than they were before the crisis, or simply significantly less wealthy than they might have been if they had not donated anything, for their giving to reflect a level of sacrifice deemed commendable?

The lack of consensus on these fundamental questions impairs the coherence of any widely shared, stable assessment of the performance of living donors during the pandemic.

How Long Should We Wait?

The second factor complicating that assessment involves uncertainties regarding how to evaluate changes in giving practice wrought by time-bound crises more generally. These challenges can be viewed in highest relief with respect to some of the philanthropic shifts that have garnered the most praise during the pandemic: grant makers’ and individual donors’ increased willingness to offer unrestricted, multiyear grants and to direct more funds to address racial equity and racial justice.

On the one hand, these changes were clearly sparked by the intertwined crises of Covid -19 and last summer’s protests over anti-Black police violence. They are leading evidence in the case that institutional philanthropy has passed its pandemic “test,” that it rose to the occasion.

Yet ultimately, the grade philanthropy receives might depend on when it’s given. Many of those who have applauded the moves have also expressed concerns that the practices will not be continued after the pandemic ends.

A Center for Effective Philanthropy survey of foundations released last December showed that an extremely high proportion of respondents had loosened restrictions on existing or new grants during the pandemic, but that fewer stated that they were sure they would continue to do so after the crisis subsided. The center’s president, Phil Buchanan, explained, “The question now is whether these changes were a blip or will be sustained into the future, and it’s frankly too soon to tell.”

If that’s the case, is it also too early to administer an evaluation? Can we, or should we, assess the performance of philanthropy during the pandemic before we know whether the reforms many donors embraced are temporary or permanent? Does the philanthropic response to the crisis have to point to some longer-lasting, fundamental shift in donor-grantee relations to be of real value, or can the scope of an evaluation of a response to a time-bound event itself be time-bound?

These are especially vexed questions given that Covid-19 exposed and exacerbated the effects of another set of crises, linked to economic injustice and racial inequity, that raged before the pandemic struck and will continue to rage long after the pandemic subsides.

In fact, given that many of the advocates and activists who had been working to address these crises had been calling for similar changes to philanthropic practice for years, and had until the pandemic met with only modest gains, it’s also worth asking whether it makes sense to dock points for lateness from grant makers who adopted them only in response to the Covid-19 crisis. Or, given that we don’t know how “sticky” the changes will be, perhaps an “incomplete” is the more appropriate grade?

Philanthropy and Vaccines

The third challenge is likely the most volatile. It involves a review of philanthropy’s role in the creation, manufacture, and distribution of Covid vaccines, a debate that in many ways has come to stand in for an assessment of philanthropy’s contributions to the public good more generally. In the early days of the crisis, when the idea of the pandemic as test was first invoked by many philanthropy boosters, it was often in this context.

“Private wealth to the rescue,” crowed the Wall Street Journal, which highlighted a collaboration between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Mastercard’s Impact Fund, and Wellcome to accelerate development of virus vaccines and treatments. “This is philanthropy’s shining moment,” Newsweek announced, citing grant makers who advanced innovation in testing, therapeutics, and vaccine development.

If public appraisals of philanthropy’s response to the pandemic have focused on Covid vaccines, that scrutiny has often centered on the Gates Foundation as an institution (full disclosure: I’m a grantee) and on the figure of Gates himself as both donor and “spokesman for science.”

Gates’s engagement with the Covid vaccine push has taken place on several fronts; the foundation has funded vaccine research and manufacturing capacity, and it has also been at the forefront of efforts, through international bodies such as Covax, to “work toward global equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines.”

The Gates Foundation has also recently joined with the WHO Foundation to initiate a mass fundraising campaign aimed at getting 50 million people around the world to make small donations to Covax.

At the same time, Gates has become an outspoken defender of the global health system in which all these efforts occur, one that grants a significant, quasi-heroic role to for-profit drug corporations, one in which government (and philanthropy) support that role through various forms of subsidy, and in which pharmaceutical company monopolies of technology and intellectual property are safeguarded.

In covering Gates’s vaccine equity efforts, the New York Times noted the heavy evaluative weight it would probably bear: “If the initiative … manages to help protect the world’s poor from a virus that has already killed more than 1.3 million people, it will affirm the strategies he has promoted in his philanthropic work,” featuring a close partnership between philanthropy and private industry. “If the endeavor falls short, however, it could intensify calls for a more radical approach,” one in which private philanthropy and industry would have a much less significant role.

As the efficacy of the leading Covid vaccines in immunizing against the virus became clear, their creation in such a short time was often heralded, in the words of Anthony Fauci, as a “historic, unprecedented achievement,” one which philanthropy could claim a modest degree of credit for, as a junior partner alongside government and private industry.

And in the early months of the Biden administration, the general optimism that its handling of the Covid crisis engendered in the United States dampened critiques of the approach that Gates championed. Philanthropy was a key component of a system that seemed to be working, at least to many of the more than half of adult Americans who have received at least one vaccine dose. If not exactly philanthropy’s “shining moment,” an assessment of its Covid response has been buoyed by a sense that things in the United States are getting better and by an unspoken counterfactual that suggests that without philanthropy’s support for that system, things would likely have been much worse.

And yet it would be very difficult to call this a full vindication for philanthropy. The situation in the United States might be improving, but the state of vaccine access and equity in much of the world signals, as the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared in January, that we are “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.”

According to the Times, only 0.2 percent of Covid vaccine doses have been administered in low-income countries. The situation in India grows increasingly dire. Meanwhile, as of the end of April, Covax had distributed only about 43 million doses, out of the 2 billion it has promised by the end of the year.

Many critics of the system with which Gates is now closely associated—which promotes public-private partnerships and leans heavily on voluntary efforts by companies, governments, and philanthropies to address equity—believe those figures have unequivocally discredited it. It promised equity; it failed that test.

As a bloc of developing countries recently explained at the World Trade Organization, “The model of donation and philanthropic expediency cannot solve the fundamental disconnect between the monopolistic model it underwrites and the very real desire of developing and least-developed countries to produce for themselves.”

Critics do not merely believe Gates’s model has failed, but also that he had become one of the chief impediments to the emergence of an alternative model, in which the Covid vaccine is understood to be a public good and information about and technology relating to vaccine production is openly shared.

And so, as much as Gates has been celebrated for his role in the Covid response, in other quarters, he has been demonized. And because of Gates’s global prominence as a philanthropist, so, too, have the contributions of philanthropy more generally.

The press initially focused considerable attention on the outlandish conspiracy theories that grew out of Gates’s prominence in the early Covid vaccine push, which suggested, for instance, that he was funding vaccines as a way to implant microchips in unsuspecting men and women.

Yet now the highest profile demonization of Gates, while at time dabbling in conspiratorialism, is rooted in a clear-eyed conviction that he represents a politics that many critics of capitalism abhor. It’s difficult to overstate the vitriol directed at Gates stemming from this antagonism.

A recent article in the New Republic, outlining how Gates “Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines,” makes this point graphically: It was accompanied by an illustration of Gates with devil horns.

The Biden administration’s recent decision to support a waiver of Covid vaccine patent protections gave serious ammunition to Gates’s critics, one of whom claimed it showed that Gates was “now officially on the wrong side of history.” (Though it represented a surprising about-face, the Gates Foundation’s announcement the next day that it would support a “narrow waiver” of those protections during the pandemic will be unlikely to mollify those critics.)

The New Republic

And yet if the administration directs significant government funding to Covax, as some global health advocates are pushing as a next step in addressing the vaccine equity crisis, that move could be interpreted as an endorsement of Gates’s general approach. To update Teddy Schleifer, both sides could still claim to have a point.

In many respects, philanthropy critics and philanthropy champions inhabit very different worlds right now, worlds that reflect divergent experiences of the pandemic and contending ideologies mobilized to understand those experiences. These are unlikely to be bridged in the months ahead, as two postpandemic narratives solidify: the Covid response as success and the Covid response as failure; Covid response as a resolution of crisis or as a key element of the crisis itself. This split in interpretations will likely combine with other challenges in evaluating how philanthropy responded to the Covid “test” to prevent the formulation of a single, definitive verdict in the months and years to come.

Does this mean we should suspend judgment? Of course not. The lack of consensus about philanthropy’s performance during the pandemic might even be a reason to double down on judgment. It means only that we shouldn’t expect the immensity of the Covid crisis to provide some analytic force of its own that would deliver us from the need for debate. It means we should expect that the indeterminate moral status of philanthropy will likely be as much a part of the postpandemic world as it has been a part of the pandemic itself.