Gates and Fauci: Colonizing the Dark Continent
After sealing their collaboration with a handshake, Gates and Dr. Fauci geared up their vaccine partnership quickly; by 2015, Gates was spending $400 million annually on AIDS drugs—mainly testing them on Africans.71, 72 If he could prove that an AIDS remedy actually worked in Africa, the subsequent payoff from US and European customers would be astronomical.
For Gates, the immediate advantage of his new alliance with Dr. Fauci was clear. The imprimatur of his partnership with the US government’s premier public health khedive anointed Gates’s public health experiments with credibility and gravitas. Moreover, Dr. Fauci was an international power broker controlling a gargantuan bankroll and wielding Brobdingnagian political wallop across Africa. A trusted presidential confidant, Dr. Fauci had made himself the indispensable rainmaker for the river of HIV funding flooding the African continent. Dr. Fauci had, by then, persuaded a succession of US presidents to burnish their humanitarian bona fides by redirecting US foreign aid away from the causes of nutrition, sanitation, and economic development and toward solving Africa’s HIV crisis with vaccines and drugs. His success in extracting a $15 billion commitment from George W. Bush in 2003 for AIDS drugs in Africa solidified Dr. Fauci’s reputation as a global powerbroker capable of delivering US dollars to any African potentate who cooperated with his AIDS enterprise.73 Despite his miserable track record at actually reducing illness over the next decade, he nevertheless persuaded President Bill Clinton, in May 1997, to set a new national goal for science by making the cure for African AIDS his JFK moonshot promise. In a speech he delivered at Morgan State University, Clinton said, “Today let us commit ourselves to developing an AIDS vaccine within the next decade.”74 Largely due to Tony Fauci’s influence, Clinton would squander billions of taxpayer dollars on this fruitless crusade during his presidency and millions more of corporate and philanthropic contributions through the Clinton Foundation during his twilight years.75
George W. Bush similarly relied on Dr. Fauci’s counsel, diverting $18 billion of the US government’s relatively anemic foreign aid contributions to Dr. Fauci’s pet global AIDS projects between 2004 and 2008 alone.76
In 2008, the Journal of the European Molecular Biology Organization published a peer-reviewed article examining how the Gates/Fauci partnership had skewed NIH funding to reflect Gates’s priorities, “The Grand Impact of the Gates Foundation. Sixty Billion Dollars and One Famous Person Can Affect the Spending and Research Focus of Public Agencies.” That article showed how, following the Gates/Fauci handshake, NIH had shifted $1 billion to Gates’s global vaccine programs “at a time when overall NIH budget experienced little growth.” The article outlines the technical details of the Gates NIH partnership; the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust funneled their donations through the NIH Foundation, which administers the money while Gates determines how it is spent.77 In this way, Gates has cloaked his pet projects with the imprimatur and credibility of the United States government. He has effectively purchased himself an agency directorate.
There is little objective evidence that all the treasure has extended or improved the lives of Africans, but every penny accrued to Fauci’s reputation as Africa’s foreign aid Golconda. When it came to public health policy in Africa, Dr. Fauci owned the keys to the kingdom. Gates needed Dr. Fauci to unlock the door.
Citing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that charity can be a “wicked dollar,” sociology Professor Linsey McGoey explains that philanthropy can have evil effect when it “places its beneficiaries under a boot rather than recognizing their equal right to foster their own independence, to realize their individuality.”78 Professor McGoey is the author of the 2015 book No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Profits of Philanthropy.
Pharma had designs on Africa; Bwana Fauci and Bwana Gates donned pith helmets, grasped their machetes, shouldered their weaponized vaccines and toxic antivirals, and made themselves the twenty-first-century versions of the crusading European explorers Burton and Speke—bestowing the blessings of Western civilization upon the Dark Continent and requiring only obedience in return. “They are here to save the world,” says McGoey of philanthrocapitalists, “as long as the world yields to their interests.“79 Thanks to their powerful collaboration, Pharma would emerge as, perhaps, Africa’s cruelest and most deadly colonial overlord.
HIV provided Gates and Dr. Fauci a beachhead in Africa for their new brand of medical colonialism and a vehicle for the partners to build and maintain a powerful global network that came to include heads of state, health ministers, international health regulators, the WHO, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, and key leaders from the financial industry and the military officials who served as command center of the burgeoning biosecurity apparatus. Their foot soldiers were the army of frontline virologists, vaccinologists, clinicians, and hospital administrators who relied on their largesse and acted as the community-based ideological commissars of this crusade.
Philanthrocapitalism’s Global Imperium
In August 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt forced Winston Churchill to sign the Atlantic Charter as a condition for US support of the Allied effort in World War II. The Charter—a heartening emblem of American idealism—required the European allies to relinquish their colonies following the war. For two centuries, unimpeded access to the colonized world’s rich national resources had been the principal source of European wealth. The Atlantic Charter and nationalist liberation movements in the 1950s and ’60s dismantled the traditional colonial model in Africa. The continent, however, quickly reopened to “soft colonization” by multinational corporations and their state sponsors.