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The World Health Organization’s institutional transparency and public perception have been very problematic during the past couple decades. Many critics perceive the WHO as a dire threat to global health and the sovereignty of nations’ domestic health policies. The organization largely operates under a veil of secrecy. It is not uncommon for leaked information from the WHO’s internal affairs and closed door meetings to contradict its public statements to the media.
Regardless of whether you view the Covid-19 pandemic as a natural and very real global health threat or as an orchestrated release of a human engineered virus to enforce Western nations to usurp greater social control over their populations, in either scenario the US, the WHO, UK and many EU nations performed dismally in a scientifically valid pandemic response. Consequently, and in light of global pandemic unpreparedness, the WHO in alignment with Western nations began undertaking a major overhaul of existing legally binding global health policies, rules and regulations. New amendments to the World Health Assembly’s International Health Regulation (IHR) treaty and the creation of a WHO Pandemic Treaty have raised alarms worldwide among politicians, public health professionals, and health policy advocates.
The pandemic treaty and IHR pandemics would tighten the existing enforcement of nations’ behavior and policies during pandemic responses. It entrusts the WHO with overreaching powers that undermine national sovereignty, including the final word on health and vaccine passports, testing and tracing, permissible medical treatments, lockdown and border crossing protocols and quarantine zones. Rather than functioning as a counsel proposing recommendations, the WHO would be a dictator over nations’ emergency response. It would strengthen the pharmaceutical industry’s intellectual property rights for diagnostics, drugs and vaccines; and the WHO would pay itself 20 percent for “pandemic-related products.”
Even worse, lower income nations would find themselves economically subservient to wealthy nations that would threaten their domestic health security. Finally, the treaty would be anchored in the UN health agency’s constitution and endow the WHO with policing policies and the authority to impose judicial charges upon nations who violate the treaty’s rules. This could even include the imposition of international sanctions against a country. According to Human Rights Watch, the treaty has come under strong attack by human rights organizations for failing to enshrine core human rights protections under international law.
The good news is that during the last World Health Assembly in May 2022 with the majority of the 194 member nations participating, the WHO confronted a surprising backlash.
Although there was no formal vote, 47 African nations, all of the five original BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and others rejected the treaty amendments. At the time, Brazil threatened to leave the Assembly if the treaty were to be approved.
This has pushed the WHO against the wall since a formal vote in May 2024 will require a two-thirds majority. Given the events during the past year, the weakening of the US’ global prestige, the West’s debacle in Ukraine, Europe’s economic crises, and the expansion and influence of BRICS, current trends seem to indicate it will be a very difficult uphill battle for the WHO to get the treaty passed.
Source: World Health Organization
However, the pandemic treaty also exposes deeper nefarious motivations by the Western nations and the WHO itself that demand attention. Although many critics of both the WHO and China have accused the two operating in cahoots together, China’s rebuking of the treaty has left some mouths open.
Other critics wrongly associate the WHO treaty as a China project because of China’s past support of the WHO’s current Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus. But that relationship seems to have soured after the WHO reproached China’s zero Covid policy and regulations. Therefore, the treaty may be best understood from several competing motivations by different players.
On the one hand, the WHO represents the worst of the transnational globalist intentions to grab control from sovereign nations. The WHO in effect is the informal servant of the World Economic Forum’s stakeholder vision of a global unipolar architecture to write and control all rules that will lead humanity into the future. Second, Western nations, notably the US and European Union—which are already entrenched in the missions of WHO and the UN—may benefit from the treaty’s harsh policing measures on other nations.
Penalties for violating the treaty’s rules can ideally serve as an economic weapon against nations on America’s enemies list such as China, Iran and Russia. For example, if during a future pandemic China or Russia decide to enact their own pandemic response measures that may contradict the rules of the WHO treaty, economic sanctions or perhaps bank or investment freezes could be enforced. And since the US has always been slap happy to impose sanctions on any country that turns its nose up to American demands and threats, what sane nation outside of the US’s sphere of control would agree to ratify a draconian treaty?
It shouldn’t be difficult to understand the BRICS’ rejection of the pandemic treaty. As the most vital emerging economic bloc spearheading a multipolar order to challenge globalist unipolarity, an underlying principle in the BRICS’ economic development and trade relations is respect for each other’s national sovereignty. National sovereignty and the BRICS’ reluctance to interfere in the political affairs and culture of a nation is diametrically opposed to a treaty basically written and enforced by unelected officials in an international organization with a dreadful track record in upholding his mandate to protect public health.
The third important player in the pandemic treaty is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Gates’ GAVI Vaccine Alliance on which the WHO is one of its four permanent Board members.
Other friendly observers in the pandemic planning include the Gates’ funded Global Fund and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Besides China, Director-General Tedros gained his WHO job with Gates’ backing. Consequently, the treaty may be viewed as an ancillary expansion of Gates’ funded projects and financial philanthropic interests and investments. It has the potential to serve as a backdoor for his own global empire.
Gates has publicly stated his admiration for the Chinese Community Party’s draconian zero Covid policy, which has terrorized millions of Chinese citizens and deprived them of their human rights.
In the topsy-turvy universe philanthropic capitalism, humans simply serve technology that reward private coffers. The perversion of such philanthropy can lead to the dehumanization and mechanization of humanity in order to further drive technological progress and capital profits, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul presciently warned in the early 1960s.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Gates took the opportunity to expand his influence over international responses by creating some rather odd organizations such as Act Accelerator (a public-private partnership) and its vaccine enterprise Covax.
Acting in parallel to the WHO’s early backdoor strategic efforts to write amendments to the IHR and begin the design of a pandemic treaty, these new ventures were motivated by the need to develop a new structure for an international pandemic response specifically for Covid. According to Health Policy Watch, because this was a plan of action created and funded by the world’s most renowned “humanitarian altruist”, governments complacently supported his efforts.
The architecture, goals and motivation of the WHO pandemic treaty are clearly antidemocratic and violate basic human rights. As the second largest WHO funder, we urgently need to evaluate all of Bill Gates’ donations, grants, credit lines, new ventures and partnerships in a similar light.
For example, his Foundation has donated to the neoconservative war mongering Council of Foreign Relations’ Global Health Program to chart global disease outbreaks and provide analysis to governments, policymakers and business leaders. Despite the apparent benefits of mapping the course of infectious diseases, such as measles, pertussis, polio and others, this program is not professionally peer-reviewed. The Program is largely based upon anecdotal evidence and offers no science-based analysis or solutions for confronting real-time health risks.
Bill Gates’ role in the research and development of new vaccines and efforts behind global vaccination campaigns are public and very well documented. In 2012, he called upon the global health community to inaugurate a decade of vaccines. For Gates, vaccines are God’s work, a “miracle” but also a “fantastic investment.” His determination to get every child fully vaccinated, and to establish the infrastructure for a robust and everlasting treadmill to bring new vaccines into the market is seemingly a personal mission. In his own words, he has stated there is nothing “to stop us succeeding.”
In 2000, the Gates Foundation founded GAVI Vaccine Alliance and that organization’s Global Fund for Children’s Vaccines.
GAVI is a global collaboration that includes governments, the WHO, the Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, UNICEF, private vaccine companies, and other influential entities. Each has been a zealot vaccination promoter. The organization’s mission is to vaccinate every child in Africa. In addition to donations and traditional grant giving, it also provides lines of credit. For example, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative received a $100 million line of credit to empower the nonprofit organization to influence HIV vaccine development within the vaccine industrial complex.
But Gates’ vaccination mission has been overly enthusiastic and in some documented cases clearly nefarious. Some of the Gates’ funded vaccination projects have had very serious consequences:
- In 2014, Foundation funds went to experimental HPV vaccine trials in India, in joint collaboration with Glaxo and Merck, that violated ethical standards. Over 1,000 girls between the ages of 9 and 15 developed severe autoimmune diseases and fertility disorders. Seven girls died. The Gates’ Foundation faced a lawsuit by the Supreme Courts of India following an investigation into the scandalous trial fraud.
- Gates’ collaboration with India’s National Technical Advisory Group resulted in a catastrophe of unmonitored overlapping polio immunization programs triggering an epidemic of non-polio acute flaccid paralysis that affected 49,000 children. Gates vaccine programs were forced to leave India. Cases of vaccine derived polio now outnumber cases from wild polio
- In December 2012, in the small village of Gouro, Chad on the edge of the Sahara Desert, 500 children were locked in their school and force-vaccinated with an unlicensed meningitis A vaccine. Students who refused would have their education terminated. These children were vaccinated without their parents’ knowledge. During investigations, the entire operation was discovered to be run by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the WHO’s and UNICEF’s on-the-ground networks. Despite the scandal, the Gates Foundation statement to the press reported, “MenAfriVac is a tremendous success story for the global health community. It is the first vaccine developed specifically for Africa, and it proves that global partnerships can develop and deliver high-quality, low-cost vaccines.”
- In 2010, the Foundation’s support for Glaxo’s experimental malaria vaccine trials killed 151 African infants and seriously injured another 1,000.
- A tetanus vaccine administered to Kenyan women in child bearing years was laced with Human Chorionic Gondatropin (hCG), which causes miscarriage and renders a woman sterile. The discovery was made by the Kenyan Catholic Doctors Association and the UNICEF vaccine campaign’s funding was traced back to Gates Foundation.
Gates is also the major funder for the Vaccine Confidence Project with the mission to “to monitor public confidence in immunization programs by building an information surveillance system for early detection of public concerns around vaccines; by applying a diagnostic tool to data collected to determine the risk level of public concerns in terms of their potential to disrupt vaccine programs; and, finally, to provide analysis and guidance for early response and engagement with the public to ensure sustained confidence in vaccines and immunization.”
Shortly after the WHO officially announced the Covid-19 pandemic as a global threat, Gates announced he would spend billions of dollars to fund seven separate coronavirus vaccine development projects. The pandemic leveraged the Foundation to emerge as the foremost leader in the vaccine industry’s response to the Covid crisis. Gates gained free entrance into the offices and boardrooms of all the leading players savoring the opportunity to launch a fast-tracked vaccine in the hopes it would become mandatory and reap astronomical revenues.
However, in our opinion, Gates’ honesty and integrity has always been questionable.
Duplicity between his organizations’ actual financial investments and humanitarian funding are common.
For example, frequently Gates has stated his opposition to Big Tobacco and claims he refuses to invest or fund any organization and company contributing to smoking. However, an investigation uncovered the Foundation had invested in Big Tobacco for quite some time. Similarly, behind his verbiage on tackling climate change and shifting to non-fossil fuel technologies at the TED conference,
Gates remains a heavy investor in Big Oil, particularly Exxon-Mobile and British Petroleum—perhaps the two most corrupt oil companies in recent decades. Therefore as a billionaire investor, irrespective of the persona he exhibits as a humanitarian and admirable philanthropist, the motivations of the Foundation’s funding should be held with a great deal of suspicion.
During his time as the president of Microsoft, Gates’ reputation as an upstanding tech entrepreneur and genius was destroyed during an antitrust lawsuit. What Gates managed to achieve was to monopolize the PC operating system by leveraging what economists call “network effects,” which drive monopolization.
According to Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma College, who writes about the corruption of Silicon Valley, network effects are the ability to dominate a young market and take advantage of a product’s rapid usage. In effect, a company is legally bribing customers’ loyalty. In many respects, this is what Gates has been doing in his faux philanthropy.
Stories and accounts about Gates present the picture of a man-child with a caustic and often crass personality. It is no secret that Gates was a difficult boss to work with. He was known to be extremely critical, belligerent, sarcastic and his anger would often degrade employees. He was a fierce taskmaster as the Washington Post reported, and Fortune magazine listed him as an “egotistical jerk” along with other billionaires such Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Often he would vow to destroy competitors or put them out of business, such as Apple, Netscape, Lotus, Sun Microsystems, etc. Temper tantrums involving yelling and fist pounding were spectacles during Microsoft’s internal meetings. Therefore to regard Gates as a legitimate philanthropist is in our opinion an oxymoron. The Greek word “philanthropy” means to love humanity. And Gates is anything but.
Before embarking upon his philanthropic crusade, Gates’ reputation took a beating in the media as a very unlikeable person. As one commenter observed, “his philanthropy… helped rebrand his name.” This raises questions about the transformation of Gates into a benevolent benefactor to human needs and crises. Or his philanthropy another act of genius to earn exorbitant profits? Yet profit earned under the disguise of charity only serves Gates’ more unquenchable ambition for power.
Rabia Zakaria writing for The Baffler notes that the large NGOs, funded by billionaires, end up taking the place of governments, and this enables “the individuals who control them [to] function as a quasi-autocracy, where Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg are free to meddle in anything, forcing the world’s poorest to tolerate their megalomaniacal and stupid plans.” Nobody ever elected any of these wealthy moguls to lead the world in any public health endeavor; nevertheless their wealth alone empowers them to do so. British sociology professor Linsey McGoey described Bill Gates’ philanthropy as “asking an arsonist to hose down your house after he just set it on fire.” And in his book Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas defined corporate-based philanthropy as “marketworld” – a world where billionaires like Gates play the market based upon who and what companies will most prosper from their charitable giving.
This has been very evident in the enormous wealth Gates has acquired through his philanthropic giving to vaccine development for illnesses in the developing world while donating to the World Health Organization, which pilots widespread vaccination campaigns. The Foundation is another “network effect” designed to gain from a monopoly again; however now Gates has camouflaged it as a humanitarian enterprise. Furthermore, Tim Schwab, author of The Bill Gates Problem, observes the oligarchic elites’ fake philanthropy is best understood as “tax-privileged political power.”
Of course, Gates’ philanthropic enterprises are not limited to medicine, vaccines and public health. In order to capture the power and influence of a monopolist “network effect” funding needs to reach into other industries and private and public programs, ventures and activities. The Foundation’s funding, therefore, has penetrated chemical agriculture and farming, GMO PR groups such as the Cornell Alliance for Science and Emerging Ag, the latter a covert coalition of academics to infiltrate the UN’s decision-making regarding genetics, and education.
To give an idea of the extent to which the Foundation has penetrated academia and scientific literature, it has bequeathed to universities $8 billion during the past two decades and has funded over 20,000 scientific papers in the Web of Science database.
For example, the Chicago Times reported that the Foundation poured $4 billion into projects to transform American public school education by developing “engagement pedometers—biometric devices students would wear to enable teachers to determine students’ attention in the classroom. One critic charged Gates with viewing children as Pavlov dogs.
Other disturbing projects include “temporary sterilization microchips” for women in low income countries, non-profit health education projects to undermine traditional medicine such as Ayurveda in India, the Better
Than Cash Alliance to push for a cashless society, a massive 5G structured smart city near Phoenix, and solar engineering projects to dim the sun by high altitude dispersion of chemical dust. Finally, the Gates Foundation has become a major force in for-profit and nonprofit media and journalism to control narratives favorable towards his investments. Among the media outlets that have received Gates’ funding and coaching are ABC, the PBS NewsHour, NPR, New York Times, Huffington Post, the Guardian and many health policy and medical magazines and journals.
This portrait of the WHO and its leading private funder painted above leaves with a serious question. What can we do to put the breaks on the WHO pandemic treaty amendment? It seems certain that if the World Health Assembly vote next May defeats the treaty, this would be a harsh blow to the Gates’ empire. Although only sovereign nations will participate in the vote, Gates evidently has been banking on its success.
What can be done at the grassroots level is to keep abreast of the pandemic treaty’s developments and updates. Recognize that the treaty is not only an assault on the sovereign rights of nations, but also a direct attack on your personal human rights and freedoms.
Passing laws, bills, and binding treaties, either by honest or by unscrupulous means, is always easier to accomplish than to undo. If passed, the treaty will inevitably become a new template, a new operating system, for even more draconian and oppressive globalist measures to be added. There are voices in Congress, largely within the GOP, who realize the WHO’s threat to American sovereignty and oppose the treaty.
These are times when citizens need to drop their delusional partisanship and support whatever is morally and ethically correct regardless of which side of the aisle states simple common sense truths that protect individual freedoms rather private interests. Therefore, write and nag your Senators and Representatives on a regular basis. Likewise, badger the mainstream media with condemnations for ignoring the WHO”s pandemic treaty’s human rights violations and for their negligent reporting.
Oddly, this may be an occasion when the US worst real or imagined enemies, such as China, Iran and Russia are actually on your side. Go figure.
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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.
They are regular contributors to Global Research.
