WHO, GAVI, and the Global Fund effectively function as ideological commissars enforcing Gates’s vanity priorities. The Times reporter found that their oversight has caused “key measures of societal health have stalled at appalling levels or worsened.”174
Gates’s claim that his vaccines have “saved several million lives” is a reflexive trope for which he offers no proof, no validation, and no accountability. Most of the preeminent decision makers and advisers in the Gates organization are former pharmaceutical industry moguls and regulators who not surprisingly share his pharma-centric worldview.
For example, Dr. Tadataka Yamada, an unsavory bully who served as president of the Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program from 2005 to 2011, was the former research director for GlaxoSmithKline.175 He left GSK just a few steps ahead of a US Senate Finance Committee seeking to question him about multiple accusations that he conducted an intimidation campaign to threaten and silence prominent doctors exploring the British drugmaker for knowingly killing some 83,000 Americans with its blockbuster diabetes drug, Avandia. Gates knew of Yamada’s sordid conduct because the Senate Committee staffers sent his foundation a letter requesting Yamada submit to questioning. A 2007 article by one of these staffers, Alicia Mundy, describes how Yamada repeatedly lied to his interrogators.176, 177, 178 Yamada’s successor at BMGF, Trevor Mundel, was an executive at both Novartis and Pfizer. The foundation’s chief communications officer, Kate James, worked at GSK for almost 10 years. Penny Heaton worked for Merck and Novartis before Gates named her as director of Vaccine Development at BMGF. So it’s not surprising that Gates’s success metrics rarely measure better health outcomes, but only the number of vaccines administered and the number of pills distributed and consumed.
“Many believe that [the Global Fund’s] tight remit is increasingly becoming a straitjacket,” complains a 2007 editorial on the Global Fund in the Lancet Infectious Diseases.179 “The failure to support basic care as comprehensively as vaccines and research is a blind spot for the Gates Foundation,” said Paul Farmer, recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship and founder of Partners in Health, which has received Gates Foundation funding for research and training. “It doesn’t surprise me that as someone who has made his fortune on developing a novel technology, Bill Gates would look for magic bullets” in vaccines and medicines, Farmer said. “But if we don’t have a solid delivery system, this work will be thwarted.” He added, “That’s something that’s going to be hard for the big foundations. They treat tuberculosis. They don’t treat poverty.”180
African public health leaders protest that Gates refuses to finance traditional medical supplies that spell life or death in African clinics.
Lesotho’s Health Minister Mphu Ramatlapeng (now Executive Vice President of the Clinton Foundation) told the Times that a $7 million annual donation would allow her to raise the pay of every government health professional by two-thirds, sufficient to retain most of them. But this sort of banal need bores Mr. Gates. His Global Fund has poured $59 million into Lesotho to advance his priorities, which are the high-profit vaccines and drugs that enrich his pharma partners. Dr. Fauci and Gates’s obsession with AIDS is great for companies like Merck and Glaxo, with which the two men partner, but it’s been a lousy deal for Africans.181
Like Dr. Fauci, Gates raises expectations, yet takes no responsibility and offers no convincing proof that his schemes have had a beneficial impact on morbidities, public health, or quality of life. There are meager signs of tangible benefits to the poor.
Instead, every effort to measure the health outcomes of Gates’s interventions has exposed them as cataclysmic for their beneficiaries. In 2017, the Danish Government commissioned a study of health outcomes among African children who received WHO’s flagship DTP vaccine—the world’s most popular inoculation. They found that vaccinated girls had ten times the death rate compared to unvaccinated girls.182
The investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that Botswana, a favored target of Gates’s and his corporate amigos’ largesse, has seen few tangible benefits from the attention. Botswana is a stable, well-governed democracy with a relatively high living standard and a small population, but one of the world’s highest HIV infection rates. In 2000, the Gates Foundation partnered with Merck to launch a $100 million pilot program in Botswana to showcase how mass AIDS treatment with vaccines, patented antivirals, and prevention could eliminate AIDS in Africa. The pilot’s disastrous failure instead became a parable for how Gates’s obsession with expensive pharmaceuticals is killing Africans. The project produced no reduction in HIV rates. By 2005, the virus had spread to a quarter of all adults.183
All those deadly retrovirals and vaccines from Tony Fauci’s little shop of horrors exacted a fearsome toll on Botswana’s mothers and infants. The rate of pregnancy-related maternal deaths nearly quadrupled, and child mortality rose dramatically.
Health economist Dean Jamison, formerly editor of the Gates Foundation– funded reference book, Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries, acknowledged that the Gates Foundation’s narrow obsession with AIDS drugs may have accelerated death and illness in Botswana by drawing the nation’s top medical professionals away from primary care and child health. “They have an opportunity to double or triple their salaries by working on AIDS,” Jamison said. “Maybe the health ministry replaces them [when they leave government service], maybe not.”184
The Gates Foundation has poured billions into sub-Saharan Africa through the Global Fund, to finance vaccines and antivirals for AIDS and TB treatment for 3.9 million people. But one AIDS patient, Moleko, told the Times, “The clinics don’t have what we need: food.”185
Majubilee Mathibeli, the nurse at Queen II hospital who gives Moleko her pills, wept in frustration as she told the Times reporter that four out of five of her patients ate fewer than three meals a day.
“Most of them,” she said, “are dying of hunger.” In Lesotho and Rwanda, dozens of patients described hunger “so brutal that nausea prevented them from keeping their anti-AIDS pills down.”186
Mathibeli said that Gates’s Global Fund was out of touch. “They have their computers in nice offices and are comfortable,” she said, nervous about speaking bluntly. But “they are not coming down to our level. We’ve got to tell the truth so something will be done.”187
Dr. Jennifer Furin, the Lesotho director for Partners in Health, a Boston-based NGO, made a similar complaint. By giving African patients medicine without food, she said, “You’re consigning that person to death because they are poor.”188