To combat this crisis, WHO—by then, wearing Bill Gates’s boot on its neck— convened a group of handpicked experts, all sworn to secrecy, for a closed-door meeting in Geneva on January 31, 2012, to discuss damage control on the Heffron study and the mountain of HIV research that supported her. On February 16, 2012, WHO and its mysterious expert cabal—unsurprisingly—announced its preordained decision: Women living with HIV/AIDS or at high risk of HIV/AIDS can safely use Depo-Provera.84
Betsy Hartmann, a longtime reproductive rights advocate, ridiculed WHO’s convenient new guidelines: “This reversal despite 25 years of studies citing an increased risk of HIV transmission among women using it raises question marks whether WHO abandoned caution due to ‘outside encouragement’ by special interest groups.”85 Hartmann was clearly referring to BMGF.
In the wake of WHO’s self-serving declaration, Melinda Gates announced in July 2012 a billion-dollar contribution as BMGF’s share of a four-billion-dollar collaboration with USAID, PATH, and Pfizer with the goal of promoting Pfizer’s Depo-Provera across sub-Saharan Africa.86 Pfizer and USAID committed the remaining $3 billion to African contraceptive projects.
Outcry and censure from dozens of international women’s rights advocates and reproductive health groups greeted Melinda Gates’s announcement.
According to a detailed report by Jacob Levich, “The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation,” “Mrs. Gates minimized the proven risk of acquiring HIV/AIDS with Depo-Provera by directing the public to a contrived eight-page ‘Technical Statement’ published by the Gates Foundation’s supplicants at WHO, assuring the public that Depo-Provera is safe, and that all contrary scientific research that linked Depo-Provera to HIV infection was “inconclusive.”87
To quell the growing uproar, Gates funded a WHO study to debunk the HIV association once and for all. This time he skipped over Heffron to fund a more “reliable” group of researchers (environmental lawyers call this sort “biostitutes”). On October 21, 2015, WHO released its investigation—which, not surprisingly, concluded that “There is no evidence of a causal association between DMPA use and an incidence in women’s risk of HIV acquisition.”88 WHO then issued new guidelines that mirror precisely those recommended by Pfizer, Depo-Provera’s manufacturer.
Some forty reproductive health groups demanded that WHO’s director, Margaret Chan, sideline the new guidelines until Gates’s study could survive a rigorous reevaluation process. WHO ignored those pleas.89
The centerpiece of the Gates $4 billion caper is a “self-injection” syringe—a plastic bubble attached to a needle—for administering Depo-Provera. Pfizer creates the gizmo, but Gates’s Seattle-based legate, PATH, markets it under the new brand name “Sayana Press.” PATH’s former director, Chris Elias, was by then president of the BMGF. Through PATH, Gates will distribute these devices, costing $1 per three-month dose, to 120 million women in sixty-nine of the world’s poorest countries.90 With contributions that Gates plans to squeeze from those governments, these lucky ladies will pay little or none of the cost.
Pfizer, of course, will make a killing. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Market Watch, “Pfizer could potentially earn approximately $36 billion in sales resulting from an unprecedented Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) investment—$560 million from BMGF, totaling $4.3 billion with government contributions—that promotes Depo-Provera as the optimum contraceptive for women of color and low-income women.”91
Levich explains that this scheme is a cunning dodge to evade US regulations that require Pfizer’s label include its dire Black Box warning bearing the words: “FDA,” “Black Box,” “warning,” and “osteoporosis,” and that the administering clinician inform every recipient that the drug poses life-threatening harm. In the United States, pharmacists can never dispense Depo-Provera directly to a patient to self-inject, since the law requires that medical personnel counsel each patient about risks. Ignoring these safeguards in Africa would expose Pfizer to criminal prosecution and thousands of lawsuits under the Alien Tort Claims Act, which could allow aggrieved African women to sue negligent US drugmakers in US courts if they suffer injuries as the result of failure to warn.92 Pfizer’s apparent strategy for insulating itself from liability is to use PATH and BMGF as surrogates to market its contraception.
Furthermore, to promote Depo-Provera’s uptake among Blacks, PATH makes a series of outlaw, off-label claims that Pfizer could not legally make about the product. PATH claims that Depo-Provera protects against endometrial cancer and uterine fibroids and reduces risks of sickle cell anemia and iron deficiency anemia—diseases that disparately injure Blacks. FDA has never approved Depo-Provera for cancer prevention or for any of these other uses. It is therefore illegal for Pfizer to promote these off-label claims. Presenting Gates and PATH as its intermediaries is apparently also Pfizer’s strategy for evading US laws that prohibit off-label claims. Levich adds: “These statements taken in totality are contextually false and designed to specifically circumvent the FDA’s Black Box warnings. If Depo-Provera is genuinely a safe and effective contraceptive, with only minimal side effects, why then are Gates, Hopkins, USAID, Planned Parenthood, and Pfizer’s other intermediaries deliberately concealing the plain “Black-Letter” FDA Black-Box warnings in their effort to minimize and conceal Depo-Provera’s life-threatening harm?”93
Put bluntly, Gates and his confederates are tricking African women into taking the contraceptive by deceiving them about its safety and lying about its efficacy against diseases that disproportionately harm Blacks—something Pfizer executives could go to jail for. Gates’s willing partner in this fraud is USAID.
USAID’s Director, Dr. Rajiv Shah, has been a serial coconspirator in Gates’s many racist flim-flams. For a decade prior to his gig running USAID, Shah worked for Bill Gates’s foundation (2001–2010) as the principal fundraiser for GAVI’s World Immunization Programs. Shah candidly acknowledged that BMGF’s and PATH’s stamp of approval on Depo-Provera serves as a clever strategy for insulating Pfizer from criminal and civil prosecution for violating FDA regulations.94 Gates’s caper aims to artfully remove the FDA’s jurisdiction by using PATH as its surrogate and by effectively transferring regulatory authority to the WHO.