Larry Page’s secret war on the flu

Google co-founder’s efforts to beat influenza are nothing to be sneezed at

Now that Larry Page has stepped down as CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, he could be following in Bill Gates’s footsteps and tackling global health challenges.

According to charity and business documents obtained by TechCrunch, the billionaire co-founder of Google has been quietly waging a war on the flu.

Thousands of children and teachers in San Francisco’s Bay Area will receive free flu shots at their schools this year from Shoo The Flu, which describes itself as a “community-based initiative.” In fact, it is wholly funded by a for-profit company controlled by Page. Another of his companies, Flu Lab, is supporting multi-million dollar efforts to develop a universal flu vaccine. Neither effort makes public Page’s role in them.

Larry Page was not always so shy. In 2012, he and his wife paid for children to get free shots at local Target department stores. “For some children, the cost of a flu shot could be prohibitive, so Larry and Lucy want to remove that obstacle and increase the number of children immunized this flu season with a goal of vaccinating as many children as possible in the San Francisco Bay Area,” said a representative of the Page’s private charitable foundation at the time.

In 2013, Page’s foundation formed Shoo The Flu LLC, and the next year, the company started providing flu shots for children at schools. Between January 2014 and May 2015, the program successfully vaccinated over 8,000 students and teachers, at a cost of around $88,000. Any references to Page’s involvement soon faded away.

A contract with the Alameda County Public Health Department shows that Shoo The Flu LLC promises to reimburse the department and the local school district for the full costs of the program. This includes coordinating and financing vaccine delivery, education, marketing, and evaluating its success. Shoo the Flu LLC has estimated the cost of doing that, from 2015 to 2019, to be $572,000.

In return, the County is forbidden from sharing any data, tests or analysis of the program without Shoo the Flu LLC’s permission.

Shoo the Flu LLC is only one of Page’s public health initiatives. In April 2018, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a Grand Challenge competition that would award $12 million to researchers working on a universal flu vaccine – one that could eliminate the need for annual shots, and potentially prevent a deadly global flu pandemic. Page and his wife Lucinda Southworth were said at the time to be contributing funds.

In August this year, when the Gates Foundation revealed the Challenge’s first recipients, the Pages were nowhere to be seen. Stat News reported that a brand new philanthropic group, Flu Lab, had stepped in to replace Page and his wife. “What we want to do at Flu Lab is to fuel bold approaches to find those breakthroughs that we don’t expect,” said Casey Wright, Flu Lab’s CEO.

In fact, Wright had been Shoo the Flu’s director since it was founded, and is now heading up Page’s latest company, Flu Lab LLC. Page is still very much involved in the Grand Challenge, albeit now from behind the scenes.

While both Shoo The Flu and Flu Lab call themselves “charitable organizations,” their legal status is actually that of traditional for-profit companies. In filings with California regulators, both describe their activities as the “investment and management of… assets.”

Unlike traditional charities, Page’s companies are not required to file tax returns that are open for public inspection, nor do they have to distribute a proportion of their assets every year. However, Shoo The Flu is funded directly from Page’s charitable foundation, the Carl V Page Memorial Foundation.

“If Page is getting a tax deduction from giving money to his Foundation, and the Foundation, in turn, is making a non-charitable distribution [to an LLC], that’s troublesome,” says Harvey Dale, director of the National Center on Philanthropy and the Law at New York University. “The IRS would be free to ask the Foundation to demonstrate that any funds flowing to the LLC were properly aimed at a charitable purpose.”

Between 2015 and 2017, the most recent year for which documents are available, the Foundation gave Shoo the Flu over $4.1 million – apparently enough to fund its vaccination campaign for over 25 years. Because it is a private company, there is no way of knowing whether Shoo the Flu has spent the remainder on other activities or is stockpiling it for the future.

Flu Lab and Shoo the Flu did not respond to detailed questions from TechCrunch about their funding or Page’s involvement, but Shoo the Flu did state that its activities are in the process of being transitioned to Flu Lab.

Flu Lab CEO Casey Wright wrote: “Flu Lab’s structure provides maximum flexibility to support our mission. Flu Lab is funded by individuals who share concerns about the urgent need for more innovation and more funding to address the current global influenza health crisis, and the threat that an influenza pandemic represents.”

“Even if Page were to choose in the most exceptionally wise and effective way, I would object to the creation of LLCs in which billionaires can hide the exercise of their power,” says Rob Reich, co-director of Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. “He should instead be disclosing his funding and the strategy behind it. This is an ordinary expectation in which any exercise of power deserves scrutiny, not gratitude.”

Page has long believed in philanthrocapitalism: the idea that charities should be run more like private businesses. In 2014, he even suggested that he might leave his fortune (now estimated at over $60 billion) to Elon Musk, citing the entrepreneur’s vision of a Mars colony.