Antipathy toward Locally Controlled Health Care Systems
Dr. Francis Omaswa, special adviser for human resources at the WHO, estimates that Gates’s spending “could be five times more beneficial”189 if he directed his philanthropy toward addressing poverty and supporting existing health systems. This is the most common critique among knowledgeable public health experts. According to Global Justice Now, the BMGF’s “heavy focus on developing new vaccines detracts from other, more vital health priorities such as building resilient health systems.”190 Unfortunately, the idea of building local institutions to support democracy and public interest is inconsistent with Gates’s technology-based approach to public health.
As Dr. David Legge explained to The Gray Zone, Gates “has got a mechanistic view of global health, in terms of looking for silver bullets. All of the things he supports are largely framed as silver bullets. . . . That means that major issues that have been identified in the World Health Assembly are not being addressed including, in particular, the social determinants of health and the development of health systems.”191
University of Toronto public health Professor Anne Emanuelle Birn wrote in 2005 that the Gates Foundation had a “narrowly conceived understanding of health as the product of technical interventions divorced from economic, social, and political contexts.”192
“The Gates Foundation has long championed private sector involvement in, and private sector profit-making from global health,” Birn told The Gray Zone. One of GAVI’s senior representatives even reported that Bill Gates often told him in private conversations that he is vehemently “against health systems” because it is a “complete waste of money.”193
Katerini Storeng, researcher at Oslo’s Centre for Development and Environment, writes that a GAVI staffer told her that the foundation was a “very loud, vocal voice, saying that we do not believe in the strengthening of health systems.” “A former GAVI employee and HSS [health systems strengthening] proponent recounted how he and his colleagues used to ‘roll down the HSS posters’ when Bill Gates came to visit the GAVI headquarters in Geneva because he is known to ‘hate this part’ of GAVI’s work, Gates’s antipathy toward public health systems reflects a pathological—almost bigoted contempt for African institutions and science,” Storeng’s report also notes. Gates’s patterns of funding reflect his bias toward white Western institutions and his hostility toward indigenous community-based African solutions.194, 195
Linsey McGoey argues that a commitment to “true equity should entail offering money directly to capable Health teams based in the global South, better resourcing of their universities, their access to scientific research, and their ability to publish more extensively leading journals.”196
Gates seems impervious to the importance of cultivating local leadership, institutions, and talent. His giving patterns reinforce the colonial architecture that keeps the authority to “call the shots,” outside Africa. Investigating the Gates Foundation’s global health spending in 2009, British public health policy expert David McCoy found that of 659 grants BMGF awarded to nongovernmental or for-profit organizations, 560 went to organizations in high-income countries, mainly in the US. Only thirty-seven grants went to NGOs based in low-or middle-income countries. Similarly, of the 231 grants BMGF awarded to universities, only twelve went to universities based in developing regions. Linsey McGoey points out that the very limited direct funding to these countries automatically excludes scientists and program managers who best understand the problems from contributing creative solutions.197
In his book The White Man’s Burden, economist William Easterly, who codirects the Development Research Institute at New York University, asks, “Who chose the human right of universal treatment of AIDS over other human rights?”198 The answer to that question, of course, is Bill Gates.
Bill Gates’s continent-wide experiment on the African population is a long tragic joke. The Times reporters deliver its devastating punchline: “2006 data, the most recent available, show a paradoxical relationship between GAVI funding in Africa and child mortality. Overall, child mortality improved more often in nations that received smaller than average GAVI grants per capita. In seven nations that received greater-than-average funding, child mortality rates worsened.”199
Neutralizing the Press
Piller and Smith’s Los Angeles Times exposé on Gates’s calamitous African adventure is an artifact of an expired era. Investigative journalism of this probative quality is a quaint relic of a time when editors and producers still permitted their reporters and correspondents to express skepticism toward Gates. Even before the open censorship of the COVID epoch, US media reports about Gates’s charities operated in the narrow range between obsequious fawning and adulation. This is no accident. By 2006, the tsunami of advertising revenues from pharmaceutical firms—about $4.8 billion annually—had already drowned out most of the voices of vaccine dissent in mainstream media.200 By 2020, those expenditures grew to $9.53 billion.201
After the devastating Los Angeles Times piece, Gates moved aggressively to neutralize the once-independent press with compromising grants that struggling news organizations couldn’t refuse. An August 2020 expose by Tim Schwab in the Columbia Journalism Review showed how Gates dispensed at least $250 million in grants to media outlets including NPR, Public Television (PBS), The Guardian, The Independent, BBC, Al Jazeera, Propublica, The Daily Telegraph, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, The Financial Times, The National Journal, Univision, Medium, and the New York Times to dampen journalistic appetites for—well—journalism.202,203 In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation finances The Guardian’s entire “Global Development” section. That shrewd investment presumedly earned the couple this February 14, 2017 Guardian headline: “How Bill and Melinda Gates helped save 122m lives—and what they want to solve next.” The Guardian calls Gates and his partner Warren Buffett “Superman and Batman.”204