While unusual numbers of Black celebrities were dying postvaccination in America, an eyebrow-raising number of anti-vax political leaders were simultaneously expiring in Africa. The epidemic of untimely deaths among high-profile black African heads of state and key government ministers and physicians who opposed Bill Gates/COVAX policies provoked a wave of conspiracy theories suggesting that these men were murdered to silence dissent. The phenomenon was so striking during the first year of the pandemic that both Reuters and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published articles seeking to explain the troubling trend. The Internet assassination speculations reached a boil following the strange murder of President Jovenel Mo?se of Haiti by a team of elite, well-trained Colombian mercenaries with links to United States intelligence agencies. Mo?se was a vocal opponent of the WHO vaccine program. The African leaders who died suddenly after criticizing WHO vaccination policy included President John Magufuli of Tanzania (March 17, 2021), Prime Minister Hamed Bakayoko of Ivory Coast (March 10, 2021), President Pierre Nkurunziza of Burundi (January 8, 2020), and Madagascar’s popular, influential, and anti-vax ex-President Didier Ignace Ratsiraka (March 28, 2021). Kenya’s beloved physician Stephen Karanja, the chairman of the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association—who had exposed the WHO sterilization program in 2014 and who criticized the agency’s COVID rollout in 2020—also died, reportedly of COVID (April 29, 2021). A peer-reviewed article in the BMJ titled “Why have so many African leaders died of COVID” lists seventeen heads of state and leading government health ministers who passed in the twelve months between February of 2020 and February of 2021. The BMJ article states that almost all of these deaths resulted in dramatic shifts in national health policies from skepticism toward strong support for vaccination in their respective countries. The article points out that the overall death rates (1:33) among African elected leaders from COVID are seven times the rates for their sex and age and demographics of the general population during that time period.164
I do not endorse the theory that these men were murdered, nor do I dismiss such speculation out of hand. It is naive to believe that powerful men and women who threaten a trillion-dollar industry allied with Western military and intelligence agencies do so without risk. I document the keen interest by the Western intelligence community and militaries in the African vaccine enterprise in Chapter 12, “Germ Games.” The historic involvement of Western intelligence agencies in coups and the murders of African leaders on behalf of their corporate clientele is well documented. I have a clear personal memory of the shocked reaction by my father and my uncle John Kennedy to the assassination of Congo’s liberator Patrice Lumumba on my birthday, January 17, 1961, a week before my uncle John Kennedy’s inauguration as US President. JFK regarded Lumumba as the “George Washington of the Congo.” US and European mining companies had their eyes on the Congo’s vast mineral wealth, and Lumumba—a beloved nationalist who led the Congo’s liberation movement against Belgium—had sworn to deploy that wealth, instead, to benefit the Congolese people. We have since learned that the CIA and the Belgian intelligence agencies collaborated in Lumumba’s murder. (In 2002, Belgium formally apologized for its role in the assassination.)165 CIA Director Allen Dulles, who planned to kill Lumumba with poison toothpaste, knew that my uncle had enormous affection and admiration for Lumumba. Dulles feared that JFK would interfere with the CIA’s plan to liquidate the charismatic leader. Among other mischief, the CIA overthrew governments in Ghana in 1966 and Chad in 1982.
Congressional investigations in the 1970s exposed the CIA’s years of experimentation to develop untraceable poisons and secretive murder tools. CIA scientists, including NIH brain surgeon Maitland Baldwin, working under MKUltra’s director Sidney Gottlieb at Ft. Detrick, concocted a diabolical arsenal of assassination weaponry including beamed radio frequency radiation, pathogenic microbes, and dissipating chemicals, all intended to mimic natural deaths. This armory of toxins gave the agency capacity to assassinate uncooperative foreign leaders while avoiding suspicion. Such shenanigans suggest that it is our duty as citizens to remain alert to the times democracy might lose control of rogue intelligence agencies.
Doctor Gates, I Presume!
Media recipients of pharma advertising dollars and Gates Foundation lucre like to characterize Gates as a “public health expert.”166 But six years after Gates summoned Dr. Fauci to his Seattle mansion, two Los Angeles Times investigative reporters, Charles Piller and Doug Smith, employed the term “White Man’s Burden” to describe the catastrophic impact of Gates’s medical meddling in Africa.167 That title suggests that Gates’s efforts to rescue the dark races from disease and famine mask all the familiar impulses for imperial control. The comprehensive study provides eloquent testimony to the lethal effect of Gates’s natal arrogance on children.
Piller and Smith detail how Gates’s systematic diversion of Africa’s international medical spending to his high-tech, high-price, and often untested vaccines is killing babies across Africa. Gates’s prioritization of vaccines has dried the stream of foreign assistance that once flowed to basic nutrition and that financed the cheap, functional medical devices that could prevent many deaths. The team at the Los Angeles Times documents how, in a single Lesotho hospital, one or two babies die from asphyxiation every day for lack of a $35 oxygen valve: “That lifesaving valve is outside the purview of Gates’s $400 million annual vaccine giving—almost all of which goes to HIV, polio, TB, and malaria vaccines.” Gates’s regimen has also deprioritized the off-patent malaria medicines like hydroxychloroquine that could prevent half of all malaria deaths at 12 cents per dose, as well as $4 mosquito nets that can spare a child from contracting malaria. It estimates that three dollars of food and conventional medicines to each new mother could prevent five million child deaths annually.168
The Times investigation found that Gates’s programs, including those of the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance, have had net negative consequences on public health. In fact, the Times found an inverse correlation between dollars spent by Gates’s charities and declines in children’s health. The nations that get the most Gates money see the worst health outcomes.169
By narrowing the focus of international relief aid to fund pharma solutions to a handful of celebrity diseases, Gates has not only reduced public expenditures on basic equipment and lifesaving food and water, he has pulled many of the best healthcare workers and researchers away from lifesaving basic care.
The LA Times quotes leaders in half a dozen sub-Saharan African nations facing desperate shortages while doctors and nurses chase extravagant salaries that Gates’s Global Fund pays to clinicians who provide antiretroviral drug therapy, known as ART, for HIV/AIDS patients: “The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea, and asphyxia.”170
In Rwanda, the Los Angeles Times reports, nurses earning $50 to $100 a month in local clinics work beside Gates-supported nurses earning $175 to $200 a month. “All over the country, people are furious about incentives for ART staff,” said Rachel M. Cohen, who is Doctors Without Borders’s Lesotho mission chief. Her organization staffs the government health clinics.171
The Los Angeles Times concludes that Gates’s obsession with vaccine-preventable diseases has proportionally reduced assistance streams for nutrition, transportation, hygiene, and economic development, causing negative overall impacts on public health: “Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.”172
The Gates Foundation addresses these catastrophic impacts on broader health concerns by blocking Africans from talking about any problem that is not susceptible to a vaccine solution. According to the report, “Gates-funded vaccination programs have instructed caregivers to ignore—even discourage patients from discussing—ailments that the vaccinations cannot prevent. This is especially harmful in outposts where a visit to a clinic for a shot is the only contact some villagers have with healthcare providers for years.”173