By 2017, Gates’s power was so complete that he handpicked his deputy, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as the WHO’s new director general despite complaints that Tedros would be the first director general to the WHO without a medical degree and despite Tedros’s dubious background. Critics credibly charge Tedros with running a terror group associated with extreme human rights violations including genocidal policies against a rival tribal group in Ethiopia.136 As Ethiopia’s foreign minister, Tedros aggressively suppressed freedom of speech, including arresting and jailing journalists who criticized his party’s policies. Tedros’s key qualification for the WHO gig was his loyalty to Gates. Tedros previously served on the boards of two organizations that Gates founded, funded, and controls: GAVI and the Global Fund, where Tedros was Gates’s trusted chair of the board.137,138
GAVI is the most tangible outcome of the partnership Gates sealed with Fauci in early 2000. Under the terms of the partnership, Dr. Fauci greenhouses a pipeline of new vaccines in NIAID labs and farms them out for cultivation in clinical trials by his university PIs and the pharmaceutical multinationals in which Gates holds high investment stakes. Gates then builds out supply chains and creates innovative financial devices for guaranteeing those companies markets in Third World countries. A key feature of this scheme is Gates’s capacity, through WHO, to pressure developing countries to expedite and purchase the vaccine, and to use GAVI as a bank through which wealthy countries cosign the debt. Western nations once funneled their foreign aid through traditional NGOs for food and economic development. Gates has captured those “deal flows” for GAVI and his pharma partners by pressuring Western countries to fork over their foreign aid to GAVI. Gates thereby hijacks the foreign assistance monies from wealthy governments, diverting it to drugmakers.
In May 2012, following two meetings with GAVI CEO Dr. Seth Berkley, Fauci candidly described the close relationship between GAVI and NIH.
“We, NIH, work on the upstream component of the fundamental research development. GAVI develop[s] a vaccine and get[s] it into the arms of people who need them.” Dr. Fauci explained that while “NIH is way up in the upstream, and GAVI is way down in the downstream,” there is no daylight between Gates’s organization and his agency. “. . . there are areas of synergy and outright collaboration between us in setting the standard of what is needed and what kinds of research questions are important to answer. . . . We don’t want to be putting resources particularly in the developing world if the research isn’t going to be implemented, particularly with cold chain concerns. GAVI is much more of visible, coordinated force now, with a lot of resources, working in many, many countries.” In contrast to some of the less reliable African governments, “It’s an organization you can deal directly with.”139
“Western nations originally conceived the World Health Organization and the United Nations to embody liberal ideologies implemented via a democratic structure of one nation, one vote,” India’s leading human rights activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva, told me. “Gates has single-handedly destroyed all that. He has hijacked the WHO and transformed it into an instrument of personal power that he wields for the cynical purpose of increasing pharmaceutical profits. He has single-handedly destroyed the infrastructure of public health globally. He has privatized our health systems and our food systems to serve his own purposes.”140
As Jeremy Loffredo and Michele Greenstein concede in their July 2020 article, “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.”141
The Sanctity of Patents
A singular feature of Gates’s vaccine caper—largely unnoticed until recently by the global press—is his ironclad commitment to protect pharma’s intellectual property rights. Asked in a Sky News interview if sharing intellectual property and the recipe for vaccines would be helpful, Gates replied bluntly: “No.”
“There’s all sorts of issues around intellectual property having to do with medicines, but not in terms of how quickly we’ve been able to ramp up the volume here. . . . I do a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs to make sure that work is going at full speed.”142
In April 2021, his unyielding allegiance to patent rights—and corporate profits—finally caused cracks to appear in the monolithic support for Gates among mainstream media and the public health establishment.
That month, the New Republic writer Alexander Zaitchik published a lengthy article, “Vaccine Monster,”143 describing how Bill Gates had aggressively impeded global access to COVID vaccines by the world’s poorest people in order to safeguard the profitable patent privileges of his pharmaceutical partners.
By March 2020, Indian and African nations anticipating severe vaccine shortages of COVID inoculations for their populations were clamoring for a waiver of patent rights that would allow local manufacturers to rapidly supply hundreds of millions of generic vaccines at prices that would provide access to the poor. Western nations joined the hullabaloo in the cause of patent exemptions recognizing that government innovation, vast flows of taxpayer subsidies, regulatory waivers, liability exemptions, coercive mandates, and licensing monopolies had given birth to the COVID vaccines with drug companies themselves playing relatively minor roles.
By August 2020, a global movement to waive patents for COVID19 vaccines had gathered the momentum of a runaway locomotive. Proponents included much of the global research community, major NGOs with long experience in medicines development and access, and dozens of current and former world leaders and public health experts. In a May 2020 open letter, more than 140 political and civil society leaders called upon governments and companies to begin pooling their intellectual property. “Now is not the time . . . to leave this massive and moral task to market forces,”144 they wrote. In early March 2021, the world’s leading public health authorities launched a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO to ensure that COVID19 drugs and vaccines would be universally and cheaply available—the WHO COVID19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP.