thegrayzone | President Donald Trump’s announcement this July of a U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) set into motion a process that will have a dramatic impact on the future of global public health policy – and on the fortunes of one of the world’s richest people.
The US abandonment of the WHO means that the organization’s second-largest financial contributor, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is soon to become its top donor, giving the non-governmental international empire unparalleled influence over one the world’s most important multilateral organizations.
Bill Gates has achieved a hero-like status during the pandemic. The Washington Post has called him a “champion of science-backed solutions,” while the New York Times recently hailed him as “the most interesting man in the world.” Gates is also the star of a hit Netflix docu-series, “Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak,” which was released just weeks before coronavirus hit the U.S., and was produced by a New York Times correspondent, Sheri Fink, who previously worked at three Gates-funded organizations (Pro Publica, the New America Foundation, and the International Medical Corps).
The tidal wave of mainstream media praise for Gates during the Covid-19 era has meant that scrutiny of the billionaire and his machinations is increasingly prevalent on the far–right of the political spectrum, where it can be dismissed by progressives as the conspiratorial ravings of Trumpists and Q-Anon quacks.
But beyond the public relations bonanza about Gates lies a disturbing history that should raise concerns about whether his foundation’s plans for resolving the pandemic will benefit the global public as much as it expands and entrenches its power over international institutions.
The Gates Foundation has already effectively privatized the international body charged with creating health policy, transforming it into a vehicle for corporate dominance. It has facilitated the dumping of toxic products onto the people of the Global South, and even used the world’s poor as guinea pigs for drug experiments.
The Gates Foundation’s influence over public health policy is practically contingent on ensuring that safety regulations and other government functions are weak enough to be circumvented. It therefore operates against the independence of nation states and as a vehicle for Western capital.
“Because of the Gates Foundation, I have watched government after government fall in its sovereignty,” Dr. Vandana Shiva, a scholar and founder of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, told The Grayzone.
Saving the world?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation on Earth, reporting over $51 billion in assets at the end of 2019. Bill Gates says his foundation spends a majority of its resources “reducing deaths from infectious diseases,” and through this philanthropy, he seems to have bought a name for himself as an infectious disease expert.
Corporate media networks rolled out the red carpet for Gates as he advised the world on how to handle the Covid-19 outbreak. In just the month of April, while the virus was severely impacting the U.S., he was hosted by CNN, CNBC, Fox, PBS, BBC, CBS, MSNBC, The Daily Show and The Ellen Show. On the BBC, Gates described himself as a “health expert,” despite his lack of a college degree in medicine or any other field.
The billionaire’s media appearances are shot through with a single, undeniable theme: If global leaders listened to Gates, the world would be better equipped to fight the pandemic. As the fashion magazine Vogue asked, “Why Isn’t Bill Gates Running the Coronavirus Task Force?”
So what does a Gates-led COVID response look like?
The ultimate solution
According to Bill Gates, creating and distributing a Covid-19 vaccine to everyone on Earth is “the ultimate solution” to the outbreak. Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman echoed these sentiments, proclaiming that “a successful vaccine has to be made available for 7 billion people.”
On CNN in April, the wife of Bill Gates the co-director of his foundation, Melinda Gates, lamented that she was “kept up at night” worrying about vulnerable populations in Africa and how unprepared they were for this virus. In June, she told Time Magazine that, in the U.S., black people should get the vaccine first.
Bringing a life-saving vaccine to vulnerable black populations in Africa and the U.S., and then to everyone around the world, seems noble, and Bill Gates is certainly putting his money where his mouth is. In March, he stepped down from his position on the board of directors at Microsoft and is apparently “now spending the predominant amount of his time on the pandemic.”
The Gates Foundation, the “biggest funder of vaccines in the world,” has already directly donated more than $300 million toward the global response to the coronavirus. This includes backing vaccine trials by companies like Inovio Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, and Moderna Inc., all of which are being described as frontrunners in the race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.
The foundation also co-founded and funds the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), which is investing up to $480 million in “a wide range of vaccine candidates and platform technologies.”
Even so, there might be cause for skepticism when examining the reality of a Gates-led global vaccination effort.
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