Their solution? “Candles and small mirrors, the same as the Americans did with their native Indians.”
In a March 2013 email, Epstein tells Nikolic he consulted his “best sources” — people whose conclusions he says are “very often better than the list of the various 26 three-letter agencies.”
The topic: Nigerian communities resisting a polio program “associated with both the west and with bill and melinda.”
Epstein’s source — described as “the most sophisticated, experienced and successful of the group, great experience in countries of your interest” — offered this advice:
“If he wants to get their consent, he needs to use candles and small mirrors, the same as the Americans did with their native Indians.”
Nikolic’s response?
“Great input — I guess we will need colorful beads and mirrors.”
This is Bill Gates’s senior science advisor — the man later named backup executor of Epstein’s will — laughing along with a colonial metaphor about manufacturing consent from African populations.
Nigeria’s distrust of Western vaccination wasn’t irrational. In 1996, Pfizer tested an experimental drug on children during a meningitis outbreak in Kano. Eleven children died. The resulting Trovan scandal fueled decades of vaccine hesitancy across northern Nigeria.
But in this private exchange, African resistance isn’t treated as a legitimate grievance rooted in lived experience.
It’s treated as a problem to be outmaneuvered with trinkets.
Epstein also predicted that Boko Haram would begin kidnapping polio workers for ransom — a prediction that proved largely correct.
He wasn’t guessing. He was receiving intelligence-grade analysis from sources he claimed outperformed the CIA.
And he was routing it directly to the man who controlled Bill Gates’s scientific agenda.
Nikolic told Epstein: “I would rather seek your opinion than seek opinion of 1,000 of global health experts.”
Think about that. The person advising the world’s largest private health funder trusted a convicted sex offender’s intelligence network more than the entire global health establishment.
Publicly, the Gates Foundation describes its work in Africa as “community-centered” and “evidence-based.”
Privately, the people shaping that work compared winning African consent to trading beads with Native Americans.
That’s not a communications problem.
That’s a legitimacy problem.
📄 Source: EFTA01761706, released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act justice.gov/epstein/files/…
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