Back to HIV
But despite all the excitement about COVID, neither of these partners forgot their first love, AIDS. On February 9, 2021, with his Operation Warp Speed vaccine rollout approaching the finish line, Dr. Tony Fauci took a well-earned breather to make an exciting announcement. He told his giddy media acolytes that NIH had just committed to a $200 million joint initiative with the Gates Foundation to fund the next generation of AIDS vaccines using NIAID’s new mRNA technology: “This collaboration is an ambitious step forward, harnessing the most cutting-edge scientific tools and NIH’s sizable global HIV research infrastructure to one day deliver a cure and end the global HIV pandemic.”114 Ignoring forty years of abysmal failure, NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, who plays Robin to Dr. Fauci’s Batman, added, “We aim to go big or go home.”115 That thrilling announcement occurred almost exactly forty years after the first report of AIDS.116 After four decades of cataclysmic outcomes, billions of squandered dollars, untold lives lost and failed promises, the press corps gave this most recent production the same rapt and credulous applause with which they greeted Teflon Tony’s hundred other indistinguishable pronouncements over four decades. “He is the P. T. Barnum of public health,” marvels journalist Celia Farber. “He cracks his whip and says ‘Abracadabra,’ and they all forget that they’ve seen the same trick so many times. It’s really quite astonishing.”117
By then, the Fauci/Gates arsenal of COVID pokes were topping the all-time charts for medical moneymaking by their pharma partners with Pfizer alone projecting $96 billion in COVID vaccine sales.118
Moderna followed up Dr. Fauci’s appearance with a press release announcing new mRNA vaccines for Zika, Ebola, flu, cancer, and HIV. On July 25, 2021, Dr. Fauci expanded on this exciting communiqué by announcing a new multibillion-dollar government initiative to use taxpayer money and NIAID-patented mRNA technology to prepare distinct new vaccines for twenty families of viruses that might spark future pandemics. Dr. Fauci disclosed that he was already in discussions with the Biden White House about his electrifying proposal, which he said will cost “a few billion dollars” on top of NIAID’s existing $6 billion budget. He said he planned to launch the project in 2022. Dr. Collins said he found Dr. Fauci’s proposal “compelling,” scolding that “As we begin to contemplate a successful end to the COVID19 pandemic, we must not slip back into complacency.”119 On September 2, 2021, Joe Biden came through for Dr. Fauci again— announcing a $65 billion pandemic response effort. Dr. Fauci will be its point man.
Biden’s announcement eclipsed some sad news. On August 31, 2021, Dr. Fauci acknowledged their premature termination of yet another of his African HIV vaccine experiments. A large trial on 2,600 African girls of a Johnson & Johnson HIV jab— funded jointly by NIAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—had failed to demonstrate a beneficial effect.120
The Heartbreaking Legacy of Medical Colonialism
Rudyard Kipling originally coined the term “White Man’s Burden” in his 1897 poem exhorting the moral imperative of the United States and England to impose Western civilizations and Christianity on tribal peoples for their own good.
Every student of African history is familiar with the recurring theme of well-intentioned white men visiting calamity on Africans. My interest in Africa began as a child. I have traveled the continent for six decades and met some of its most visionary leaders, including Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and Nelson Mandela. These anticolonial leaders understood that poverty is a complex conspiracy of social, historical, political, institutional, and technical maladies. It is most often best addressed through small-scale, locally tailored, trial-and-error experimentation. The optimal solutions are invariably homegrown with regular local input, disciplined self-assessment, accountability, frequent course corrections, and lots of humility by administrators, officials, and above all foreigners.
Gates’s HIV vaccine and antiviral program is due to its continent-wide scale, arguably the worst in a long parade of paternalistic Western schemes by imperialists, avaricious adventurers, scammers, schemers, charlatans, double-dealing rogues, and well-meaning dolts who regularly pledge to end African suffering.
Instead of approaching Africa with humility, curiosity, open ears, and a willingness to support local initiatives, Gates leads with the same weisenheimer arrogance that Judge Penfield Jackson pegged as Gates’s defining character trait in his 1998 ruling. At best, Gates and Dr. Fauci are just the latest in a long line of crusaders, con artists, and conquistadors who periodically appear on the continent armed with the conviction that they know what’s best for Africans. Too often, these are self-serving, one-size-fits-all vanity projects that, in the end, only compound calamity and magnify suffering. At worst, in the words of Loffredo and Greenstein, Gates and his foundation function “as a trojan horse for Western corporations, which of course have no goal greater than an increased bottom line. . . . The foundation appears to see the Global South as both a dumping ground for drugs deemed too unsafe for the developed world and a testing ground for drugs not yet determined to be safe enough for the developed world.”121
Magical vaccines are Gates’s preeminent cookie-cutter solution for the ills of poverty, famine, drought, and disease. The absurdity of expensive shots as a remedy for indigence, a salve for malnutrition, or the dearth of potable water is obvious when one considers that three billion people live on less than two dollars per day. Eight hundred and forty million people don’t have enough to eat. One billion lack clean water, or access to sanitation. One billion are illiterate. About a quarter of children in poor countries do not finish primary school.122 Poverty is a target-rich environment, but the data suggest that Gates’s vaccines miss the target altogether. Sociologist Linsey McGoey quotes a young health researcher based at the University of Cape Coast, on western Ghana: “From my point of view, it’s more like [the Gates Foundation] are selling technology than solving problems. Most of their calls have to do with developing some new technology or vaccines.”123