How Gates Controls the WHO
Worst, Gates has used his money strategically to infect the international aid agencies with his distorted self-serving priorities. The United States historically has been the largest direct donor to WHO with a contribution of $604.2 million in 2018–2019 (the last years for which numbers are available). That year BMGF gave $431.3 million and GAVI gave $316.5 million.124 Plus, Gates also routes funding to WHO through SAGE and UNICEF and Rotary International, bringing his cumulative total contributions to over $1 billion, making Gates the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO, even before the Trump administration’s 2020 move to cut all his support to the organization.
Those $1 billion tax-deductible donations give Gates leverage and control over WHO’s $5.6 billion budget and over international health policy, which he largely directs to serve the profit interest of his pharma partners. Pharmaceutical companies cement WHO’s institutional bias toward vaccines with approximately $70 million of their own direct contributions. “Our priorities are your priorities,” Gates declared in 2011.125
In 2012, WHO’s then-Director General Margaret Chan complained that because the WHO’s budget is highly earmarked, it is “driven by what [she calls] donor interests.”126 According to McGoey, “According to its charter, the WHO is meant to be accountable to member governments. The Gates Foundation, on the other hand, is accountable to no one other than its three trustees: Bill, Melinda, and Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. Many civil society organizations fear the WHO’s independence is compromised when a significant portion of its budget comes from a private philanthropic organization with the power to stipulate exactly where and how the UN institution spends its money.” McGoey observes that “Virtually every significant decision at WHO is first vetted by the Gates Foundation.”127 As the UK-based NGO Global Justice Now told Grayzone, “the Foundation’s influence is so pervasive that many actors in international development which would otherwise critique the policy and practice of the Foundation are unable to speak out independently as a result of its funding and patronage.”128 (See also “The Perils of Philanthrocapitalism,” Eric Franklin Amarante, Maryland Law Review, 2018.)
Gates’s vaccine obsession has diverted WHO’s giving away from poverty alleviation, nutrition, and clean water to make vaccine uptake its preeminent public health metric. And Gates is not afraid to throw his weight around. In 2011, Gates spoke at the WHO, ordering that “All 193 member states, you must make vaccines a central focus of your health systems.”129 The following year, the World Health Assembly, which sets the WHO agenda, adopted a “Global Vaccine Plan” that the Gates Foundation coauthored. Over half of WHO’s total budget now goes to vaccines. That narrow focus on inoculations is deepening Africa’s health crisis, according to global health experts and African officials.
Their control of several billion dollars in annual inputs gives Gates and Fauci effective control over not only WHO, but also the retinue of authoritative quasi-governmental agencies that Gates—often with Fauci’s assistance and support—created and/or funded, including CEPI, GAVI, PATH, UNITAID, UNICEF, SAGE, the Global Development Program, the Global Fund, the Brighton Collaboration, and governmental health ministries in dozens of African nations that are largely dependent on the WHO and other global health partnerships. A 2017 analysis of the twenty-three global health partnerships revealed that seven were entirely dependent on Gates funding and another nine listed the foundation as its top donor. The Gates Foundation also controls the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE), the principal advisory group to the WHO for vaccines. During a recent meeting, half of SAGE’s governing board of fifteen people listed conflicts of interest with the Gates Foundation.
The most powerful of these groups is GAVI, the second-largest non-state funder of the WHO. Gates created GAVI as a “public-private partnership” that facilitates bulk sales of vaccines from his pharma partners to poor countries.
GAVI is the template for Gates’s impressive capacity to use his celebrity, credibility, and wealth to mesmerize key public officials and heads of state into giving Gates control over their foreign aid spending. Gates launched GAVI in 1999 with a $750 million donation. The BMGF occupies a permanent seat on the GAVI board.130 Other organizations that Gates controls or can rely upon—WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank—and the pharmaceutical industry occupy additional seats, giving Gates dictatorial authority over GAVI’s decision making. The BMGF has donated a total of $4.1 billion to GAVI to date.131 But Gates has used that relatively trivial contribution—and his personal charm, I suppose—to attract over $16 billion from government and private donors,132 including $1.16 billion annually from the US government, five times the amount that Gates donates to the WHO.133
When President Trump withdrew the United States from WHO in 2020, he continued the US contribution of $1.16 billion to GAVI.134 The cumulative effect, therefore, of the withdrawal was to increase Gates’s power over WHO and over global health policy. A recent assessment of GAVI by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson offers potent testimony of Gates’s capacity to inspire the sort of obsequious adulation that has prompted Western leaders to hand over foreign policy and vast hordes of taxpayer dollars to Gates’s discretion. In August 2021, Johnson declared that GAVI was the “new NATO.”135 Switzerland, which hosts GAVI’s global headquarters in Geneva, has granted Gates’s group full diplomatic immunity—a privilege Switzerland denies to many nations and their diplomats.
Additionally, the sheer magnitude of his foundation’s financial contributions has made Bill Gates an unofficial—albeit unelected—leader of the WHO.