Bolivia to Request Extradition of Añez Regime’s Top Official
teleSUR | May 26, 2021
Bolivia’s Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo confirmed that his country will ask the United States for the extradition of Rodrigo Mendez. He served as chief of staff to Arturo Murillo, who was interior minister in the coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez (2019-2020).
He was arrested in Florida for requesting a bribe of US$582,000 to grant a contract for the purchase of tear gas ammunition for the coup-born regime.
The purchase from the Brazilian company Condor was for almost US$7 million. The acquisition was made through the U.S. company Bravo Tactical Solutions with an alleged overprice of US$2.3 million, which would have been used in bribes.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that Mendez allegedly received a second bribe payment up to US$714,000 in cash.
The evidence gathered from text messages, e-mails, and bank records revealed that Mendez was requested to write a letter to the Brazilian manufacturer to insist that the Añez regime would only buy the products through Bryan Berkman’s company.
Del Castillo explained that the extradition would be requested through Interpol channels and diplomatic notes to the U.S. State Department.
“We are sending the corresponding notes so that these people come to account to the Bolivian people,” he said, adding that Mendez and Murillo “took advantage of the opportunity to sow drug trafficking and corruption in our country.”
Stanford review finds 45% of 117 pediatric “Covid hospitalizations” were not hospitalized for Covid
By Meryl Nass, M.D. | May 24, 2021
Four things we know of probably helped drive up the number of hospitalizations coded as due to Covid-19.
One was the payment of considerably more funds by Medicare for a hospitalization coded with a Covid DRG than for a comparable illness.
Two was an extra federal payment to hospitals that met a certain threshold of Covid cases during a specified time period, as discussed by Scott Jensen, MD and recent member of the Minnesota legislature, who is now running for governor.
Three was a required Covid test for every admitted patient, which has some false positives and presumably also identifies asymptomatic cases.
Four was extra emergency payments to states that could show they had a preponderance of Covid patients.
Physicians at Stanford’s quaternary (super specialized and able to care for the very sickest patients) pediatric center examined 117 Covid-coded pediatric hospitalizations that occurred during a 9 month period from May 10, 2020 to February 10, 2021. They determined that 45% of these children were not admitted because of Covid. Their paper is short and straightforward. Worth a quick look.
America’s Public Health System Is Utterly Corrupt
By Paul Craig Roberts • Institute for Political Economy • May 24, 2021
A sure sign of a country’s collapse is the open corruption of its public and private institutions. When corruption no longer has to be hidden but can be openly flouted, the values and standards that comprised the country’s soul have eroded away.
Try to find an American institution that is not corrupt. Even when presented with the Covid threat the US public health system could not rise above the greed for profit. Effective cures, such as HCQ and Ivermectin were demonized and in many states prohibited. Most Covid deaths are the result of non-treatment.
Throughout the alleged “Covid Pandemic” regulatory agencies, health bureaucracies, medical associations, state governors, media, and Big Pharma have acted to prevent any alternative to a vaccine.
From day one the emphasis was on the profits from a vaccine. To get people to submit to an experimental and untested vaccine required the absence of cures. To keep the road open only for a vaccine even supplements such as NAC, which has shown effectiveness as both preventative and treatment of Covid, has been challenged by the FDA in its use as a supplement. In response, amazon.com, a major online marketer of dietary supplements removed NAC from its offerings.
The generation of fear was essential to stampeeding people to line up to be vaccinated. The fear was supplemented by threats of inability to travel, to attend sports events, to resume working at one’s job.
A Covid test, known as PCR, was intentionally run at high cycles known to result in a very high percentage of false positives. These false positives guaranteed a high infection rate that scared people silly. Economic incentives were used for hospitals to report all deaths as Covid deaths, thus greatly exaggerating Covid’s mortality.
As you might have noticed, last winter had no reporting of flu cases as flu was added to the Covid statistics.
A number of reports have been published that the Covid vaccine does not prevent some vaccinated people from coming down with Covid. Other reports say that vaccinated people become spreaders of Covid. There are also reports of a large number of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccine.
In order to suppress the facts and keep the Covid vaccine selling, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which supported running the PCR test at high cycles in order to inflate the number of Covid cases, runs the PCR test at much lower cycles in the case of infected vaccinated people in order to minimize the number of vaccinated people who came down with Covid.
To further create an artificial picture of the vaccine’s effectiveness, asymptomatic and mild infections are excluded from the reporting of vaccinated people who catch Covid. Only vaccinated people who catch Covid who have to be hospitalized or die from Covid are counted among the people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated. However, unvaccinated people with only minor symptoms or false positives from a high cycle PCR test are added to the number of Covid cases.
This is obvious and blatant manipulation of statistics in order to scare people about Covid while reassuring them about the vaccine’s effectiveness. Overstating the number of cases among the unvaccinated while simultaneously understating the number of people who caught Covid despite being vaccinated is shameless and protects the contrived picture of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.
The falsification of statistics in order to produce massive public fear and the prevention of treatment with known safe and effective cures in order to maximize death rates produced billions of dollars in profits for Big Pharma and associated industries, with Moderna’s CEO topping the list of nine new billionaires made rich from the rollout of Covid vaccines. These billionaires rode to their riches on the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people who died from an enforced lack of treatment — mandated deaths to protect vaccine profits.
Will anything be done about this extraordinary corruption of the American public health system?
Third of British cabinet, including Boris Johnson, has been funded by Israel or pro-Israel lobby groups
By Matt Kennard • Declassified UK • May 22, 2021
While the UK government has been backing Israel’s intense bombing campaign in Gaza, Declassified can reveal that a third of cabinet ministers and the foreign minister responsible for the Middle East, have been courted by the Israeli government or pro-Israel lobby groups.
More than a third of the British cabinet, including Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has made overseas trips funded by the Israeli government or affiliated lobby groups, it can be revealed.
Of the 23 cabinet ministers, eight have been funded to visit Israel or Washington DC while members of parliament, to the tune of at least £14,000.
Johnson went on a five-day trip to Israel in November 2004, three years after he first entered parliament. It was jointly funded by the Israeli government and Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a powerful Westminster lobby group which does not disclose its funders but has claimed 80% of Conservative MPs are members.
CFI says it “works to promote its twin aims of supporting Israel and promoting Conservatism in the UK”.
Johnson did not declare the trip in his parliamentary register of interests until four years later, in 2008, and did not disclose the cost of the trip, which may be a breach of parliamentary standards. Former chancellor George Osborne, who was also on the trip, registered it two weeks after returning.
The only public record of the visit is an article in the Spectator magazine Johnson authored soon after, in which he refers to his “affable minder from the Israeli foreign office”.
In 2012, CFI organised a “battle bus” to take Johnson on a tour of north London as part of his London mayoral election campaign.
As mayor, in 2015, Johnson visited Israel again, saying on the trip there is “something Churchillian about the country” due to its “feats of outrageous derring-do”. Two years later, now foreign secretary, Johnson referred to the “miracle of Israel” at a CFI event.

Then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, tastes spices during a visit at the Mahane Yehuda market on 10 November 2015, in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo: Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
Five other ministers in the cabinet – Alok Sharma, Kwasi Kwarteng, Robert Jenrick, Oliver Dowden and Amanda Milling – took paid-for trips to Israel from 2011 to 2016. Kwarteng and Milling visited the year after they first entered parliament, while Dowden went before he became an MP.
A further two cabinet ministers, Michael Gove and Priti Patel, were funded to visit Washington DC to attend conferences put on by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the premier Israel lobby group in the US.
The UK government has been criticised for its backing of Israel’s bombing of schools, medical facilities, media organisations and residential towers in Gaza over the past 11 days.
At least 227 Palestinians in Gaza, including 121 civilians, have been killed since Israel’s bombardment began on 10 May, according to the health ministry in the territory. A ceasefire began early on Friday morning.
While the UK government repeatedly condemned the Palestinian group Hamas for firing rockets into Israel, it did not condemn Israel for launching hundreds of airstrikes on Gaza, an occupied territory.
At the height of the violence, Johnson said: “I am urging Israel and the Palestinians to step back from the brink and for both sides to show restraint. The UK is deeply concerned by the growing violence and civilian casualties and we want to see an urgent de-escalation of tensions.”
The UK government has so far refused to halt its arms exports to Israel and significant cooperation with the country’s military, which has deepened in recent years.
AIPAC
The home secretary, Priti Patel, was given £2,500 by the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) in 2013 to be a delegate at a “forum” organised by AIPAC.
The London-based HJS does not disclose its funders but has a staunch pro-Israel position and close links to Israel. At least two HJS staffers have moved directly from the group to working for the Israeli foreign ministry, while the group’s executive director, Alan Mendoza, was a founding director of the Friends of Israel Initiative.
Patel was on the HJS’s “political council” in 2013, leaving at some point in 2016, and also previously served as parliamentary officer of CFI. She was later forced to resign as a minister in David Cameron’s government after it emerged she held secret meetings with several Israeli politicians during a “family holiday” to Israel in August 2017.
The meetings, including one with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, were arranged by Lord Polak, the honorary president of CFI.
The head of the Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, is also closely associated with CFI and has spoken at its annual business lunch, describing Israel as a “light to the world” and “an inspiration”.
In 2017, Gove received over £3,000 from AIPAC to speak at its conference in Washington DC. The Henry Jackson Society also contributed to this trip. The previous year, the HJS had paid another £2,764 for Gove to fly to New York to pick up an award from pro-Israel newspaper, The Algemeiner Journal.
UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab is also closely associated with the HJS, having also sat on the group’s “political council” while minister for justice. It is not known what membership of this council involves or if Raab is still a member.
‘Fact-finding delegation’
In 2011, the year after he entered parliament, Kwasi Kwarteng, now minister for business, was funded by the Israeli foreign ministry to visit Israel, in a trip costing £1,242.
The other visits by now serving cabinet ministers were funded by CFI, and were mostly described as being part of a “fact-finding political delegation to Israel and the West Bank”. They lasted up to six days and cost between £1,500 and £2,000.
It is not known if the MPs were given Israeli “handlers” during their visits like Johnson, but the Israeli government is known to be involved in programming such trips.
The current minister for the COP26 climate negotiations, Alok Sharma, made a CFI-sponsored trip to Israel in 2013, while Oliver Dowden, now culture minister, went the following year.
In 2016, Robert Jenrick, now minister for housing and local government, visited alongside Amanda Milling, the current minister without portfolio, who had entered parliament the previous year.
According to CFI: “The centrepoint of the [2016 CFI] visit was a high-profile meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the announcement of the UK Government’s plans to stop local councils boycotting Israel.”
This announcement was made by Matt Hancock, then head of the Cabinet Office whose trip to Israel coincided with the CFI delegation. Hancock is now health secretary.
The CFI group also met then British ambassador to Israel, David Quarrey, at his residence in Tel Aviv. Quarrey is now Johnson’s international affairs adviser.
Robert Jenrick later called Israel “one of the great achievements in human history” at a CFI event. He told parliament last week that the UK government supports the idea that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism”, a controversial position that could be regarded as itself anti-Semitic as it conflates all Jewish people with the state of Israel.
Meanwhile, the current Attorney General, Michael Ellis, who is not a minister but attends cabinet, went on a CFI-funded trip to Israel in 2014. Current foreign minister James Cleverly visited the following year, just three months after first entering parliament.
On his 2015 trip, Cleverly said: “Israel is an amazing country, there’s no doubt about that.” Now minister for the Middle East, Cleverly on Wednesday provided strong support for the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.
He told parliament: “The UK unequivocally condemns the firing of rockets at Jerusalem and other locations within Israel,” adding: “We strongly condemn these acts of terrorism by Hamas and other terrorist groups who must permanently end their incitement and rocket fire against Israel. There is no justification for the targeting of civilians.”
Cleverly also told parliament that his government opposes an International Criminal Court enquiry into Israeli war crimes in the occupied territories and continues to reject calls to halt arms exports to Israel and recognise a Palestinian state.
Aside from trips to Israel paid for by lobby groups, other members of Johnson’s cabinet have been funded by pro-Israel individuals. Defence secretary Ben Wallace has received a donation to his constituency party from Lord Steinberg, the founder and president of the Northern Ireland Friends of Israel group until his death in 2009.
Meanwhile, Liz Truss, minister for international trade, in 2015 received a donation from David Meller, a British businessman who was a director of CFI from 2012 to 2014. Meller has also donated to Michael Gove. DM
Matt Kennard is head of Investigations at Declassified UK, an investigative journalism organisation that covers the UK’s role in the world.
Bill Gates’s money and his influence on British universities
This the fourth and final part of a series
By Karen Harradine | The Conservative Woman | May 20, 2021
My series on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GF) has revealed the unparalleled influence one man, Bill Gates, has over:
· the WHO and global health policy;
· British public health and Covid-19 policy, through the Gates Foundation’s funding of a number of powerful and interconnected scientific institutions, charities and companies and their personnel crossover with the government’s science advisers;
· The Government’s appointed science advisory bodies Sage and Nervtag through the many members and subcommittee members who are employed by academic institutions funded by GF over many years.
This is only a partial picture of the long reach of Bill Gates into our scientific institutions. On Monday I focused on three GF-funded universities which have informed Sage on doomsday Covid-19 modelling: Imperial College London (ICL), Warwick University and the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine (LSHTM). There are many more academic universities and centres which have taken the GF dollar, including those involved in the research and manufacture of vaccines, who between them set parameters of approved research and gave their research leads significant clout.
They are thus able ‘to ignore or cherry pick science and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates’, as the executive editor of the BMJ Kamran Abbasi explained it recently. This toxic combination of scientific bias by commission and omission, exacerbated by GF funding, has led to the shutting down of science debate, to active censorship and even to dissemination of scientific untruths, as has been reported elsewhere in TCW pages.
Many scientists and academics have been worryingly silent about the government’s anti-science response to Covid-19. The few who have spoken out have been scorned and smeared by Sage and their nodding dogs, the MSM. Can this culture of silence can be traced back to the extensive GF funding of British universities?
Let’s take Britain’s pre-eminent universities, Oxford and Cambridge, first.
The GF’s funding of Oxford University goes back 21 years, to a first $4.7million grant for malaria and global health research in 2000. Its giving has risen exponentially since then. In 2019, the GF gave Oxford $40million, including $9.6million for vaccine development. In 2020 it gave $10.8million, including $310,970 to improve understanding of Covid-19. To date this year, Oxford has received $152,553 from the GF.
Oxford University is the site of the Covid-19 Recovery trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVid-19 thERapY), promoted as the world’s largest randomised clinical trial. The trial’s chief investigator, Professor Peter Horby, is a key member of Sage and Nervtag.
The Recovery trial is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the GF, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and the ‘Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator’, the latter being a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard. In March 2020, Oxford University was one of three institutions to share $20million from the GF via its Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.
Professor Horby’s co-investigator at the Recovery Trial, Wei Shen Lim, is also a Nervtag member and chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation.
The deputy investigator of the Recovery trial, Professor Martin Landray, has further links to the GF. He is a Lead at the UK Biobank, which is partnered with the Wellcome Trust and also a Lead of the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre at Oxford University.
In April 2017, the GF gave the NIHR Centre funding to study antibiotic resistance in tuberculosis, and a further grant in September 2017 to study typhoid vaccines.
Further funding was provided in September 2020 to research treatments for Covid-19 in care homes.
The NIHR Centre is funded as well by the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, as noted above itself a collaboration between the GF, Wellcome Trust and MasterCard.
In March 2020, the Wellcome Trust gave £7.5million via the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to see if hydroxychloroquineand chloroquine ‘can prevent the spread of Covid-19’ (not treat it, strangely). During the same year the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator also gave $9.5million to the University of Washington to study the effects of hydroxychloroquine on Covid-19.
Professor Horby has sold the Recovery Trial as a success story, but other scientists have disputed this. Last June, hard on the heels of the retraction by the Lancet of its now-notorious paper purporting to show that hydroxychloroquine not only did not help Covid-19 patients, but actually made them worse, came news of the termination of the hydroxychloroquine ‘arm’ of the UK’s Recovery clinical trials.
As reported by Edmund Fordham in TCW, this ‘huge embarrassment was conveniently overlain by news from Oxford University that sorry, hydroxychloroquine really isn’t any good’. So even if the Lancet paper was fake, ‘a political hit job’ as one American doctor had it, Oxford’s clinical trial showed the same result.
But the trial design had already been savaged within days of launch; it was never likely to help very sick late-stage Covid-19 patients and what Professor Landray found himself struggling to explain in an interview were ‘the very heavy doses of the drug that were given – 2400 mg in the first 24 hours, a ‘dose fit for a gorilla’ as one critic had it.
Needless to say Professors Horby and Landray glossed over the inadequacies of this particular trial and quickly dismissed the use of hydroxychloroquine, vowing to concentrate on ‘more promising drugs’. And the possibility of a cheap and easy early treatment for Covid-19, from re-purposed generic drugs, especially hydroxychloroquine to prevent hospitalisation, was trashed.
Probing alleged conflicts of interest, France Soir noted the co-authorship of Professor Horby on papers reporting trials of Gilead’s remdesivir (there was no benefit in mortality), an agreement between his department and AstraZeneca for development of Oxford’s vaccine candidate, and generous funding from the GF. Curiously, there is a connection too between Professor Landray’s interests in Big Data and Gilead, a pharmaceutical company which was in merger talks with AstraZeneca last year. Vaccines are profitable, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are not. No wonder the GF invests so heavily in the organisations which research, fund and manufacture vaccines, rather than pursuing investment in better constructed early treatment trials.
A further cluster of Sage members, Professors Dame Angela McLean, Michael Parker, Gideon Henderson, Charlotte Deane and Dr Laura Merson, all work at Oxford University.
SPI-M-O members Drs Thomas Crellen, Joshua Firth and Professor Deirdre Hollingsworth are likewise all employed at Oxford University too.
Cambridge University’s GF’s funding started with an initial grant of $8.1million for agricultural development in 2012. The GF awarded a grant of $998,891 in 2019 to fund research into pneumonia, and $420,000 in 2020 for global education.
More significantly, Cambridge is the site of the Cambridge Science Park, another GF-funded venture. In May 2020, GF and Google Ventures gave $45million to Cerevance, a pharmaceutical company based at Cambridge Science Park.
AstraZeneca is opening its new R&D centre at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus this month. The vaccine giant is supported by the GF, although no details are available on funding. Cambridge University and Imperial College London, both GF-funded institutions, collaborate extensively with AstraZeneca. Sage member Professor Kamlesh Khunti has received grants from AstraZeneca and has also worked as a consultant and speaker for the company.
The Wellcome Trust is also involved in scientific research at Cambridge. Together with the Medical Research Council Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, it awarded the Cambridge-based Institute of Metabolic Science £24million in 2013. Professor Julia Gog of Sage is employed at Cambridge University, as are Nervtag member Professor Ravindra Gupta and Independent Sage member Dr Tolullah Oni.
Professor Daniela DeAngelis and Dr Joshua Blake, members of SP-I-M, also work at Cambridge University.
The GF has also funded University College London (UCL), giving its first $25.2million in 2006 for HIV research. UCL was granted a total of $10.8million in 2019 and $484,000 in 2020, including $144,000 to research vaccines last March. The GF has committed funding from 2020-2023 to study postpartum haemorrhage. UCL also collaborates with the GF and the Wellcome Trust on a research project called Global Health.
Sage members Professors Dame Anne Johnson, Andrew Hayward and Alan Penn work at UCL.
Professor Susan Michie is the Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change at UCL and sits on both Sage and Independent Sage. Her fellow Independent Sage members Professors Anthony Costello, Christina Pagel, Deenan Pillay, Ann Phoenix and Robert West all work at UCL in some capacity.
Other less prominent academic institutions, such as the University of Southampton, are also beneficiaries of the GF’s vast financing. In 2009, Southampton received $100,000 for scientific research from the GF, and was also given specific grants of $335,800 in 2014, $3.6million in 2015 and $476,214 in 2020 for vaccine research. Sage member, Professor Guy Poppy, is employed at this university, as is Professor Lucy Yardley, a member of both Sage and SP-I-MO.
The UWE Bristol also has connections with the GF, the latter funding its climate change project called Robial. Peter Case, a UWE Bristol Law Professor, wrote a report on malaria for the GF. Sage member, Professor Jonathan Benger, is employed at the UWE Bristol.
The GF has donated to a multitude of universities unconnected to Sage too, like Liverpool University, giving them a total of over $4million between 2010-2020, with the largest grant being $1.5million in 2010 for pneumonia research.
The GF also funds British charities. The Dementia Discovery Fund, part of Alzheimer’s Research UK, received $50million from the GF in 2017. A small science company in Wales, the Sure Chill Company, was given £1.4million in 2014.
The GF has also invested in the private security firm Serco, buying 3.74 million shares worth $6.6million. This collaboration is not as bizarre as it first seems. Serco is one of the companies hired by the British government to run its Test and Trace system and is likely to make up to £410million from a contract it has with the Department of Health and Social Care.
It seems that no corner of British industry lies untouched by the long reach of the GF. As my research shows, it certainly seems to be the largest funder of British science, giving Gates influence and control exceeding all others, with an ownership of scientists and scientific research as a critical dimension of his global control agenda.
The level of dominance which Gates holds over British science companies, institutions and universities is more than concerning.
Could the combined anti-science and harmful responses to Covid-19 by members of Sage, Independent Sage and Nervtag have anything to do with their multitude of connections to the GF? This is certainly jackpot time for these GF-funded scientists and academics, some of whom are having their moment in the sun pontificating on television to the supine masses. Fame is an addictive drug.
It’s not just the Tories have turned into Gates’s lapdogs. A controlling group of scientists and academics, with unaccountable power over our lives, have too.
Science and scientists that question the new groupthink or fall outside the parameters of the GF approved research have little chance. Neither do we while Bill Gates remains omnipotent.
The J&J Covid-19 vaccine is being manufactured by the anthrax vaccine company. This is its history
By Dr Meryl Nass, MD | May 19, 2021
Emergent BioSolutions will be in the spotlight today during a House Select Subcommittee Meeting on the Corona Virus Crisis, today at 10:30 am. It can be watched here.
Below, I provide the backstory aka checkered past of this company.
DOD created a plan to vaccinate its service-members against many biowarfare threat agents in the 1990s. At the time, of the bioterrorism vaccines that were being considered, only anthrax and smallpox vaccines had licenses. Anthrax vaccine was chosen to initiate the program in March of 1998.
The first 2 million doses of anthrax vaccine came from a stockpile that had been made for the US army by Michigan’s state vaccine lab (Michigan Biologics Products Institute). What became known in November 1997, after the FDA performed an inspection, was that most of the army’s 11 million dose stockpile of anthrax vaccine, stored at the Michigan lab, was multiply expired, had been redated, and was contaminated, with visible bacterial and fungal growth in some of the lots. FDA immediately shut down the anthrax vaccine factory, and quarantined 9 million of the 11 million existing doses. Unfortunately, FDA allowed the Defense Department to use 2 million doses, which it did over the next two years.
The Conclusions from FDA’s 1998 and 1999 inspection reports of the facility can be read here.
The Michigan state lab was a massive affair with many buildings on a campus in downtown Lansing. It produced a large variety of vaccines and blood products for the state of Michigan. However, over the years the state had not made the required repairs and updates. After the 1997 FDA inspection, Michigan had to repair the place or close it. Michigan decided to sell, and looked for a buyer.
The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Crowe, heard about the sale. He had come to know the el Hibri family when he was Ambassador to the UK. The el Hibri’s had purchased anthrax vaccine from the UK government laboratory at Porton Down just before the Gulf War, and resold it to the Saudi government at a 100x markup.
Crowe and the el Hibri family joined with several of the lab’s officials, and the newly formed group purchased the lab. The purchase price was about 19 million dollars. Admiral Crowe was given a 13% share in exchange for his role as Chairman of the Board, risking none of his own funds. Much of the cost was later paid by the transfer of vaccines to the state of Michigan.
The new company, formed in the first half of 1998, was named Bioport. It chose to focus on its sales of anthrax vaccine to the Army. However, the new company was deeply concerned about potential liability for the lab’s products. The purchase was delayed until the Secretary of the Army signed an indemnification for injuries that might result from use of anthrax vaccine in soldiers, and it also indemnified the company against claims if the vaccine failed to provide the expected protection against anthrax. The state of Michigan had also been indemnified by the Army to produce the vaccine. But from its 1970 licensure until 1998, almost all the anthrax vaccine had only been used in animal experiments.
After FDA had shuttered the anthrax vaccine plant for manufacturing defects, the Army paid to bulldoze and then rebuild the factory in 1999. But even after it was rebuilt, FDA withheld its approval, and the plant lay idle.
Meantime, the 2 million doses that FDA had failed to quarantine were injected into 500,000 military service-members between 1998 and 2001. Many thousands became ill. An official report on the program, quoting unnamed government officials, claimed that 1-2% of recipients had developed permanent disabilities. The military vaccinations were mandatory, and refusers were punished with a court martial or loss of a month’s pay and performance of extra duties. Nonetheless, seeing the injuries sustained by their colleagues, many refused.
In 2001, the anthrax vaccine label, a legal document that describes what is known about the product, listed the CDC’s definition of Gulf War syndrome as a possible adverse effect of the vaccine. (It has been removed from the current label.)
Five Congressional hearings were held throughout 1999 on different aspects of the anthrax vaccine program by the House Committee on Government Reform and National Security (now known as the House Committee on Oversight and Reform). Additional hearings held by other Congressional committees also touched on the vaccine program. The Government Reform and National Security Committee wrote up its findings in a report titled Unproven Force Protection. Its June 30, 1999 hearing dealt specifically with Bioport and its sole source contracts.
Despite this, Bioport has been very successful. Although the Pentagon was considering an end to the anthrax vaccine program in the summer of 2001, the sudden appearance of the anthrax letters after the September 11, 2001 attacks breathed new life into the vaccine program and turned Bioport’s fortunes around. DHHS Secretary Tommy Thompson announced in November 2001 that the anthrax vaccine plant would finally receive an FDA approval and begin production. At the end of January 2002 that is what happened.
But that was not the end of Bioport’s problems. Soldiers challenged the legality of the vaccine’s license in federal court. It was learned that while there had been efficacy testing of an earlier version of the vaccine, the current vaccine formulation had never undergone either efficacy or safety testing in a clinical trial. Aware of this major omission, FDA had withheld the issuing of a “final rule and order” for the anthrax vaccine for over thirty years.
The soldiers prevailed on the legal issues, and First District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan rescinded the vaccine license in 2004, based on the company’s failure to prove efficacy or meet basic FDA standards for licensure.
Unwilling to bow to judicial authority, the Defense Department rolled out a backup plan. A new regulatory authority had just been created, the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). An EUA was slapped on the unlicensed anthrax vaccine, and DOD quickly restarted its mandatory vaccinations. (There was no emergency: the issuing of an EUA required only the potential for an emergency.)
The attorneys for the soldiers took the case back to court, and Judge Sullivan ruled that even if an experimental medical product received an EUA, it was still investigational and could not be mandated. The law required that EUA products be offered with informed consent. To receive an EUA (unlicensed) product, the recipient must be apprised of the risks and benefits of the product, be informed of alternatives to the product, and no coercion in any form could be applied. Ergo, no mandate.
FDA waited about 18 months, and then issued a full license for Bioport’s anthrax vaccine, although there were still no efficacy data. FDA instead claimed that a 1950’s era trial of a very different anthrax vaccine was sufficient for licensure, even though that trial failed to show benefit against inhalation anthrax.
When the soldiers and their attorneys challenged the licensing decision in court, the next judge ruled in favor of FDA on the basis of “deference”—meaning that FDA could ignore its own regulations when making a determination on safety and efficacy, with or without acceptable data. In 2006 mandatory vaccination restarted.
Bioport then shed its old skin in an attempt to leave its baggage behind. It renamed itself Emergent BioSolutions. Its vaccine had been renamed BioThrax.
Emergent BioSolutions (EBS) then branched out, buying other companies, primarily those making other sole source biodefense products. The military continued to mandate anthrax and (in 2003) smallpox vaccines for service-members. Eventually EBS purchased the smallpox company as well, and the cholera and typhoid vaccines used in the US.
A 2010 report on Emergent BioSolutions, written by Scott Lilly for the Center for American Progress, was titled, “Getting Rich off Uncle Sucker.” It revealed 300% profit margins, unique for a government contractor.
The company’s business plan was to rely on insiders to sell sole source biodefense products to the US government, most of which were stockpiled and never used–inking contracts with multiple federal agencies, including CDC, DOD, NIAID, the State Department, ASPR and BARDA.
In 2012 EBS got one of three DHHS contracts to house a so-called Center for Innovation in Advanced Development and Manufacturing (CIADM) that could be used to produce pandemic or biodefense products in the event of emergencies. With this grant EBS purchased and expanded what became its Bayview factory in Baltimore. The CIADM contract essentially guaranteed Emergent a big role in any future pandemic response.
Emergent acquired the maker of Narcan nasal spray, the opioid overdose antidote. Soon FDA began recommending to prescribers that they write a Narcan script whenever they wrote a narcotic script, just in case. States started buying large quantities for free distribution. Sales rose 600% after EBS bought the company.
Under the Trump administration, retired Air Force Colonel, physician and biodefense consultant Robert Kadlec was appointed to the position of Assistant Secretary of DHHS for Preparedness and Emergency Response (aka ASPR). Kadlec had also been a consultant and business partner of EBS’ founder and chairman Fuad el-Hibri. Kadlec had omitted this information from the required disclosures for Senate confirmation. Once confirmed as Assistant Secretary, Kadlec was able to transfer responsibility for the National Strategic Stockpile (containing the US stockpiles of pandemic remedies, masks and equipment) from the CDC to his own agency. Kadlec then gave multiple sweetheart deals to EBS, until the value of EBS’ contracts with ASPR exceeded those of every other contractor.
ASPR Kadlec was blamed for cancelling a federal contract to make N95 masks while buying more and more anthrax and smallpox vaccines, pre-Covid.
Covid-19 presented a huge opportunity for Emergent BioSolutions. EBS received $628 million from DHHS to retool its CIADM factory. It inked additional contracts with the Astra-Zeneca, Johnson and Johnson, Novavax, Providence Therapeutics and VaxArt companies to provide bulk manufacturing of their vaccines in its Baltimore facilities. Altogether its pandemic contracts were worth about $1.5 Billion. It was slated to manufacture 9 separate medical products to address Covid-19, all designed by other companies.
But there were serious potential problems.
While it had a storied Board of former federal officials, Emergent BioSolutions had never brought a single product to market. Its expertise was in contracting and acquisitions, not production. It had a history of production failures, and had demanded that the federal government bail the company out, or else the sole source products the company provided would become unavailable. Some of this was detailed in the Congressional report Unproven Force Protection. Entering the pandemic, EBS was still making the same mistakes it had been guilty of twenty years earlier:
- EBS sold and continues to sell nerve gas auto-injectors to federal agencies which have been defective and are not licensed. According to the law, these products can neither be produced in the US nor sold here. Instead, Emergent manufactures them in Germany and restricts its sales to US embassies overseas.
- In July 2020, the Soligenix company requested arbitration against Emergent BioSolutions, claiming a loss of $19 million, because EBS had manufactured its experimental ricin vaccine, used in a human trial, which failed to meet specifications.
EBS did not have an active workforce in Baltimore. On September 30, EBS held an online job fair which it titled “Warp Speed Careers Event.” The event sought to recruit 300 employees. Yet EBS had begun inking vaccine contracts 5 months earlier, and could have hired and trained a workforce that was ready to go when FDA gave it the go-ahead. Instead, doing things on the cheap, EBS hired late, failed to provide adequate training to its employees, and experienced a spectacular series of production failures. Many millions of doses of its Johnson and Johnson and its Astra-Zeneca Covid vaccines had to be dumped. J and J missed its 20 million dose quota for the end of March, and FDA, despite repeated inspections, would not give the plant an authorization so its products could be used.
Despite this, somehow millions of doses produced in the unauthorized plant were shipped to Canada, the European Union, South Africa and Mexico. The EU, at least, used the product. How did that occur? We don’t know. Did any get distributed in the US? We can’t be sure none did.
On April 4, 2021, EBS announced it would receive an additional $23 million from DHHS for new equipment to use in the manufacture of Johnson and Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine.
As of last week, EBS was facing another lawsuit from its shareholders, and its stock price had fallen to $60 from the peak on February 12 of $125 per share. However, Emergent CEO Robert Kramer exercised his stock options in January and February, near the stock’s peak, earning himself over $7 million dollars in profit.
In summary, EBS, despite considerable manufacturing shortcomings, has been extremely successful at obtaining government contracts and earning huge profits. But its products have repeatedly been unreliable. The company has managed to turn failures into success, especially when its products, like civilian stockpiles of anthrax and smallpox vaccine, and nerve gas auto-injectors, are stockpiled but not used.
The public has only gradually been learning that the vaccines it thought were being produced by huge Pharma companies Astra-Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson were in fact being manufactured by the anthrax vaccine company, Emergent BioSolutions. How did it come to pass that the federal government, and these established pharmaceutical companies, bet the farm on EBS’ production of Covid-19 vaccines?
How Bill Gates & Big Pharma used children as “guinea pigs”… and got away with it

Young tribal girls were lied to, treated as “human guinea pigs” without parental consent by a Gates-backed NGO
By Bernard Marx | OffGuardian | May 18, 2021
We’ve seen a lot of India in the news recently. A lot more than we usually do. There’s an apocalypse of sorts going on there, if the popular media is to be believed. But as is often the case, these reports are devoid of any context or perspective.
While the world’s media can’t get enough of India today, in its rush to support a narrative of terror about Covid-19, twelve years ago when there was a real story going on there, the world’s media was nowhere to be seen.
SOME BACKGROUND
In 2009, a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded NGO carried out unauthorised clinical trials of a vaccine on some of the poorest, most vulnerable children in the world. It did so without providing information about the risks involved, without the informed consent of the children or their parents and without even declaring that it was conducting a clinical trial.
After vaccination, many of the participating children became ill and seven of them died. Such were the findings of a parliamentary committee charged with investigating this wretched affair. The committee accused the NGO of “child abuse” and produced a raft of evidence to back up its claim. This entire incident barely registered on the radar of Western media.
PATH (formerly the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) is a Seattle based NGO, heavily funded by BMGF but which also receives significant grants from the US government. Between 1995 and the time of writing (May 2021), PATH had received more than $2.5bn from BMGF.
In 2009, PATH carried out a project to administer the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. The project’s aim was, in PATH’s own words, “to generate and disseminate evidence for informed public sector introduction of HPV vaccines”. It was conducted in four countries: India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam. Another Gates-funded organization, Gavi, had originally been considered to run the project, but responsibility was ultimately delegated to PATH. The project was directly funded by BMGF.
Significantly, each of the countries selected for the project had a different ethnic population and each had a state-funded national immunisation program. The use of different ethnic groups in the trial allowed for comparison of the effects of the vaccine across diverse population groups (ethnicity being a factor in the safety and efficacy of certain drugs).
The immunisation programs of the countries involved provided a potentially lucrative market for the companies whose drugs were to be studied: should the drugs prove successful and be included on these countries’ state-funded national immunisation schedules, this would represent an annual windfall of profits for the companies involved.
Two types of HPV vaccine were used in the trial: Gardasil by Merck and Cervarix by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). In this article, we are going to examine PATH’s trial of Gardasil in India.
It’s worth noting here the relationship between BMGF and one of the companies whose drugs were being tested. In 2002, BMGF had, controversially, bought $205m worth of stocks in the pharmaceutical sector, a purchase which included shares in Merck & Co. The move had raised eyebrows because of the obvious conflict of interest between the foundation’s role as a medical charity and its role as an owner of businesses in the same sector.
The Wall Street Journal reported, in August 2009, that the foundation had sold its shares in Merck between 31st March and 30th June of that year, which would have been around the same time that the field trials of the HPV vaccine were starting in India. So for the entirety of this project (which was already in operation by October 2006), right up to its final field trials, BMGF had a dual role: as both a charity with a responsibility for care, and as a business owner with a responsibility for profit.
Such conflicts of interest have been a hallmark of BMGF since 2002. When Gates was making regular TV appearances last year to promote Covid-19 vaccination, giving especially ringing endorsements of the Pfizer-BioNTech effort, his objectivity was never brought into question. Yet his foundation is the part-owner of several vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, BioNTech and CureVac.
HPV VACCINE
HPV vaccine aims to prevent cervical cancer. Gardasil had been launched successfully by Merck in the US in 2006, but its sales suffered after a series of articles in American medical journals had judged that its risks outweighed its benefits. Especially damaging was an analysis of reports made to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) about adverse reactions to Gardasil.
This analysis was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on August 19th 2009. The 12,424 adverse reactions which had been reported included 772 which were considered serious, 32 of which were deaths. Other reported serious side effects included autoimmune disorders, venous thromboembolic events (blood clots) and Guillain-Barré syndrome.
In the same edition of JAMA, Dr. Charlotte Haug, then editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, wrote,
Whether a risk is worth taking depends not only on the absolute risk, but on the relationship between the potential risk and the potential benefit. If the potential benefits are substantial, most individuals would be willing to accept the risks. But the net benefit of the HPV vaccine to a woman is uncertain. Even if persistently infected with HPV, a woman most likely will not develop cancer if she is regularly screened. So rationally she should be willing to accept only a small risk from the vaccine.”
Dr. Haug also noted, “When weighing evidence about risks and benefits, it is also appropriate to ask who takes the risk, and who gets the benefit”, in a clear dig at Gardasil manufacturer Merck.
Merck’s attempts to promote Gardasil had been controversial. Dr. Angela Raffle, one the UK’s leading experts on cervical cancer screening, described Merck’s marketing strategy as “a battering ram at the Department of Health and carpet bombing on the peripheries.”
Dr. Raffle was concerned that the push to mass vaccination would harm the successful screening programme which had operated in the UK since the 1960s.
“My worry is that the commercially motivated rush to make us panic into introducing HPV vaccine quickly will put us back and worsen our cervical cancer control programme.”

Professor Diane Harper
Professor Diane Harper, then of Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, had led 2 trials of the vaccine and was adamant that Gardasil could not protect against all strains of HPV.
When Merck launched a huge public relations campaign in 2007 to persuade European governments to use the product to vaccinate all the continent’s young girls against cervical cancer, she said:
Mass vaccination programmes (would be) a great big public health experiment…. We don’t know a lot of things. We don’t know the vaccine will continue to be effective. To be honest, we don’t have efficacy data in these young girls right now. We’re vaccinating against a virus that attacks women throughout their whole life and continues to cause cancer. If we vaccinate girls at 10 or 11 we won’t know for 20 to 25 years whether it is going to work or not. This is a big thing to take on.”
So at the time that PATH was carrying out its trials in India, Uganda, Peru and Vietnam, Gardasil was a controversial vaccine: its safety, efficacy and Merck’s attempts to promote it were being questioned, not by “anti-vaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, but by the international medical establishment and the respected mainstream media.
THE GIRLS OF KHAMMAM

Children of the Koya tribe, Khammam
Khammam district, in 2009, was a part of the eastern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (boundary changes made in 2014 mean that today Khammam district belongs to the state of Telangana). The region is predominantly rural and is considered to be one of the poorest and least developed parts of India.
Khammam is home to several ethnic tribal groups,with some estimates putting its tribal population at about 21.5% (approximately 600,000 people). As is common for indiginous people throughout the world, the tribal groups of Khammam suffer from a lack of access to education. Consequently, their level of literacy is of a standard considerably lower than that of the region as a whole.
Some 14,000 girls were injected with Gardasil in Khammam district during 2009. The girls recruited for PATH’s project were between 10 and 14 years of age and all came from low-income, predominantly tribal backgrounds. Many of the girls did not reside with their families; instead they lived in ashram pathshalas (government-run hostels), which were situated close to the schools the children attended.
Professor Linsey McGoey, of the University of Essex, later stated she believed girls at ashram pathshalas had been targeted for the project as this was a way of:
“side-stepping the need to seek parental consent for the shots.”
Although we have seen a lot of India in the news recently, coverage of this country and its affairs is usually low-key. Despite being home to almost one fifth of the world’s population, reporting on India is sparse.
Few of us are aware, for example, of its abysmal history of health and safety or its long-standing tradition of corruption in government.
Such failings have been taken advantage of by unscrupulous profit-seekers for decades. Western media only reports on the consequences of these actions when their magnitude is too great to ignore.
We learned that up to 7,000 people were killed and more than half a million were injured after being exposed to deadly methyl isocyanate gas, following a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. But we learned nothing in the years leading up to it of the culture of poor standards and disregard for regulation which was ultimately responsible for the disaster.
So it was typical that PATH’s project to administer and study the effects of the HPV vaccine went unheralded in the West. Typical, too, that the same was true in India itself: the Indian media is no more renowned for its reporting on tribal groups than the Western media is for its coverage of Indians.
Despite concerns expressed about the project in October 2009 by Sama, a Delhi-based NGO that advocates for women’s health, the matter remained absent from India’s news.

Members of the advocacy group Sama
This project, then, couldn’t have been more off-the-map had it taken place on the moon, and it remained so for several months until, early in 2010, stories began to filter out from Khammam that something had gone terribly wrong: many of the girls who had been involved in the trials had subsequently fallen ill and four of them had died.
In March 2010, members of Sama visited Khammam to find out more about the emerging stories. They were told that up to 120 girls had experienced adverse reactions, including epileptic seizures, severe stomach ache, headaches and mood swings. The Sama representatives remained in Khammam to investigate the situation further.
The involvement of Sama finally brought the matter to the attention of the Indian media and, amid a barrage of negative publicity, the Indian Council of Medical Research (IMCR) suspended the PATH project.
At this point the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health began an investigation into the affair.
On May 17th, Sama produced a damning report highlighting, among other things: that the trials had been promoted as a government immunisation programme and not a research project, that the girls had not been made aware that they could choose not to participate in the trials, and that parental consent had neither been asked for nor given in many cases.
The report stated that:
“Many of the vaccinated girls continue to suffer from stomach aches, headaches, giddiness and exhaustion. There have been reports of early onset of menstruation, heavy bleeding and severe menstrual cramps, extreme mood swings, irritability, and uneasiness following the vaccination. No systematic follow up or monitoring has been carried out by the vaccine providers.”
Sama also disputed the Andhra Pradesh State Government’s claim that the deaths of four of the girls who had participated in the trials had nothing to do with vaccination.
THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMITTEE

Parliament House, seat of the Parliament of India, New Delhi
The wheels of bureaucracy are slow to turn. It was more than three years later, on 30th August 2013, when the report of the Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health was finally published. Although many had expected the report to be a whitewash, it was anything but: it made for shocking reading.
The report excoriated both PATH and the IMCR, concluding that the “safety and rights of children were highly compromised and violated.” The committee found that PATH, despite operating in India since 1999, had no legal permission to do so. It noted that although the organisation had finally received a certificate from India’s Registrar of Companies in September 2009, this certificate itself was in breach of the law.
The report stated that:
“PATH… has violated all laws and regulations laid down for clinical trials…. its sole aim has been to promote the commercial interests of HPV vaccine manufacturers…. This is a serious breach of trust… as the project involved the life and safety of girl children and adolescents who were mostly unaware of the implications of vaccination. The violation is also a serious breach of medical ethics.This act of PATH is a clear cut violation of the human rights of these girl children and adolescents. It is also an established case of child abuse.”
The committee charged that PATH had lied to it and had attempted to mislead it during the course of its investigation and recommended that the Indian Government report PATH’s violations of human rights to the WHO, UNICEF and the US Government.
The report declared that PATH’s whole scheme was a cynical attempt to ensure ongoing profits for Merck and GSK.
“The choice of countries and population groups; the monopolistic nature, at that point of time, of the product being pushed; the unlimited market potential and opportunities in the universal immunisation programmes of the respective countries are all pointers to a well-planned scheme to commercially exploit a situation. Had PATH been successful… this would have generated a windfall profit for the manufacturers by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses. It is well known that once introduced to the immunisation programme it becomes politically impossible to stop any vaccination.”
It went on:
“To achieve this end effortlessly, without going through the arduous and strictly regulated route of clinical trials, PATH resorted to an element of subterfuge by calling the clinical trials ‘Observational Studies’ or ‘a Demonstration Project’ and various such expressions. Thus the interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and self-servicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but also a serious breach of the law of the land.”

Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus National Medical Journal of India
These charges were echoed by leading voices in India’s medical community. “It is shocking to see how an American organization used surreptitious methods to establish itself in India,” said Chandra M.Gulhati, editor of India’s influential Monthly Index of Medical Specialities, “(this) was not philanthropy”.
Samiran Nundy, editor emeritus of the National Medical Journal of India and a long-standing critic of corrupt practices in health, did not mince his words:
“This is an obvious case where Indians were being used as guinea pigs.”
The standing committee’s report was also highly critical of the relationship between PATH and members of several of India’s health agencies, highlighting multiple conflicts of interest.
On the issue of informed consent, the committee confirmed the allegations made by Sama to be true, finding that the majority of consent forms weren’t signed by either the children or their parents, that many consent forms were postdated or not dated at all, that multiple forms had been signed by the same people (often the caretakers of the hostels the girls lived in) and that many signatures didn’t match the name on the form. It found that parents had not been given information on the necessity of vaccination, its pros and cons or its potential side effects.
No insurance was provided for any of the children in the event of injury and “PATH did not provide for urgent expert medical attention in case of serious adverse events.”
Further, PATH seriously contravened Indian health regulations by carrying out a clinical trial of a drug on children before first conducting a trial of the drug with adults as subjects.
Regarding the girls who had died, the committee criticized PATH, Indian medical authorities and the Andhra Pradesh State Government for summarily dismissing the link between their deaths and vaccination without conducting thorough investigations. By 2016, some 1,200 of the girls who had been subjects in the two HPV vaccine trials in India were reporting serious long-term side effects, more than 5% of the total cohort of 23,500. By then, the total number of deaths had risen to seven.
A DEATHLY SILENCE
This appalling breach of medical ethics and human rights went almost completely unmentioned outside India. The Indian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Health had literally accused an American NGO of child abuse, providing extensive evidence to support their charge, yet practically no mention of this was to be found anywhere in the Western media.
Popular science publications Nature and Science each contained a brief article about the debacle, but neither goes into any detail about PATH’s legal and ethical breaches. While the Science article is at least slightly critical, the Nature piece gives more space to a rebuttal of the charges by PATH director Vivien Tsu.
The way in which media around the world is funded by BMGF, and how this affects reporting about BMGF and the organisations it sponsors, deserves its own article. But it’s worth mentioning here that the BBC has received a total of $51.7m from BMGF, as of May 2021, and The Guardian has received $12.8m.
The Guardian, for all its claims to give a voice to the most vulnerable in the world, stayed curiously silent about the young girls of Khammam. That is, except for one article, published in October 2013, about six weeks after the release of the standing committee’s report.
The article was written not by one of the girls or one of their parents, not by one of the women from Sama who had advocated on the girls’ behalf, not even by one of the Indian parliamentarians who had been charged with investigating the affair.
No. It was written by an American man called Seth Berkely. Berkely is the CEO of Gavi, another BMGF funded health behemoth.

Seth Berkley, CEO GAVI
Berkely used his forum in The Guardian to claim that the girls who had died after being vaccinated in Khammam had committed suicide. Speaking about the 14,000 subjects involved in the trials, he said, “it would have been unusual if none of them went on to kill themselves.”
Compassion wasn’t the only element missing from his article. Not once did Berkley address the multiple breaches of law and ethics which had occurred or the role of PATH and that of his employers, the Gates Foundation, in his dismissal of this iniquity.
The Guardian began receiving funding from BMGF in August 2010. Prior to that arrangement, in 2007, the newspaper had published two separate articles which were critical of the lobbying tactics used by Merck to promote Gardasil and which questioned the efficacy of its use in mass vaccination programs.
Subsequent to their arrangement with Gates, all coverage by the Guardian of this drug (and of HPV vaccination in general) has been positive.
HOW THINGS TURNED OUT

BMGF headquarters, Seattle
The Indian government was reluctant to take any of the measures recommended by the committee. After all, there were huge amounts of money being made available to the state, institutions and individuals from organisations like PATH.
So no official reports of human rights violations were ever made by the Indian government to the WHO, to Unicef or to the US government, as had been recommended by the standing committee.
However, in 2017, it announced it would no longer accept grants from BMGF for its Immunisation Technical Support Unit, an organisation which provides “vaccination strategy advice” in relation to an estimated 27 million infants. Nevertheless, the Indian government continues to accept the foundation’s grants in other areas.
Merck, and their HPV vaccine Gardasil, have done very well since the dismal events recounted in this article. The Khammam scandal never really affected the company, due to a lack of awareness about it outside India. In 2018 alone, Gardasil sales amounted to more than $3bn, thanks to its inclusion on immunisation schedules around the world, and its launch that year in China.
PATH has never been better. Just like Merck, the lack of reporting about what happened in Khammam meant the organisation didn’t suffer. Since 2010, it has continued to receive huge funding from BMGF and, to a lesser extent, the US Government. During this period, BMGF has provided PATH with more than $1.2bn in funding.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has continued expanding its web of influence. Describing the organisation’s practices around the time of the events outlined here, Jacob Levich said:
“In essence, BMGF would buy up stockpiled drugs that had failed to create sufficient demand in the West, press them on the periphery at a discount, and lock in long-term purchase agreements with Third World governments.”
The foundation has since moved on to even more lucrative pastures. The Covid-19 pandemic has really pushed BMGF to centre stage. Gates himself has seen his public profile and political influence grow to an extent that would have been unimaginable even in 2019.
Despite his lack of either scientific qualifications or an electoral mandate, he regularly presses the need for mass global vaccination with products made by the companies he owns, using platforms given to him by the media outlets he funds.
And the girls of Khammam?
Well, those poor children and their plight wasn’t even widely known outside of India back in 2010. To say they had been forgotten would be to imply that anybody knew about them or cared about them in the first place.
Bernard Marx is the pseudonym used by a writer and teacher based in Ireland. Bernard’s areas of interest include history, politics and popular music. You can read more of his work at Notes from the New Normal
Bill Gates and the world health juggernaut

By Karen Harradine | Conservative Woman | May 11, 2021
BILL Gates’s company Microsoft has changed our lives. It turned him into one of the richest men in the world and allowed him to turn philanthropist. His endeavour began in 1994 when he established the William H. Gates Foundation, soon to be followed by the Gates Learning Foundation in 1997. He merged the organisations in 2000 creating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (GF). After the couple transferred $20billion of their Microsoft stock to the GF it became the largest charitable foundation in the world and over the next twenty years the most powerful charity in the world. Its endowment as of 2019 was $50billion.
The GF made its first donation to the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 1998. Soon after Gates pledged a further $750million to set up the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), the stated aim of which is to increase immunisation rates in low-income countries, with the WHO and the UK amongst its original founders and donors. Last year Boris Johnson pledged Gavi £1.65billion over five years at the June 2020 Global Vaccine Summit replenishment conference, which the UK hosted. Six months later Johnson met Gates and pharmaceutical bosses to discuss Britain’s vaccine rollout and future pandemic plans.
The GF holds a permanent seat on Gavi’s board. Gavi’s core partners today are the GF, the WHO, Unicef and the World Bank, with the GF giving Gavi $4.1billion since its inception. Gavi is also the fifth largest funder of the WHO, giving $355.4million last year. With the WHO, Gavi dominates global vaccination campaigns including the Covid-19 vaccine rollout.
The GF continues to donate to the WHO. Its 2020 financial contribution was over $573.5million.
The WHO’s list of top 20 donors for the two-year budget cycle of 2018 and 2019 shows the GF coming second only to the US (their $893million donation accounting for 20 per cent of the WHO’s budget) with a $531 million donation (equal to 12 per cent of WHO’s budget). The GF and Gavi together outstrip all single country donations, except that of the US.
In 2017 the GF became an official partner of the WHO. The GF’s influence over the WHO is well-documented and the two organisations are near-synonymous.
Since its inception the GF has given $54.8billion to a multitude of organisations. It has expanded globally, opening offices in Beijing in 2007 and London in 2010, and funding works in 135 countries. A letter from President Xi Jinping to Bill Gates, which you can read here, suggests Gates’s closeness to the Chinese Communist Party.
Donations from billionaires over the past 25 years have extensively bolstered the GF’s finances. Between 1994 and 2018 Mr and Mrs Gates donated $36billion of their own money, and in 2006 Warren Buffet pledged $30billion.
Eight years after establishing Gavi, Gates stepped down in 2008 as Microsoft CEO to commit more of his time to his foundation. By that time the GF was the largest charitable foundation in the US, and questions were being raised even then about its long reach in shaping US government health policies. After going into financial partnership with the GF, the publicly funded US National Institutes of Health (NIH) shifted their focus from the health and welfare of American citizens to global health. Concerns about the power, complexity and lack of accountability of GF, and Gates’s potential – effectively now realised – to become WHO’s largest donor continue to be articulated.
In 2010, with Warren Buffett, the Gateses launched Giving Pledge, a vehicle through which the very wealthy could donate to charity. To date there are no public details of who donates what through Giving Pledge, though this endeavour has turned into a tax haven for billionaires.
The GF is also a co-founder and funder of CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), as influential as Gavi but less known. CEPI is a Norwegian venture which invests in vaccines and is also funded by the Indian and Norwegian governments, the British-based Wellcome Trust and the World Economic Forum. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and member of Sage, sits on the CEPI board. In 2017 Gates said that the world was unprepared for pandemics and that CEPI’s investments in ‘DNA/RNA vaccines’ would mitigate that. Both the GF and Wellcome Trust have pledged to fund CEPI with $100million annually from 2017 to 2022.
In March last year, after Covid-19 spread globally, Gates stepped down from his position on the Microsoft board of directors, citing his desire to concentrate on Covid-19. A month later, the GF pledged to make Covid-19 vaccines available to 7billion people (the global population was estimated at 7.8billion last year). In December, the GF committed $1.75billion to develop Covid-19 tests and vaccines. The GF is now the self-appointed leader of the global response to Covid-19.
The initial endeavours of the William H. Gates Foundation to support scientific research and local charities have morphed into a global juggernaut with unaccountable power. Vast amounts of money are being channelled according to the thoughts, passions and prejudices of one man with questionable judgment.
In 1998, Gates was hauled before the US Senate to answer questions about Microsoft’s anti-trust practices. His demeanour while giving testimony was dishonest and arrogant. His performance is disturbing to watch, captured in this clip (from 1 minute 29 seconds) where he rocked repeatedly in his chair and insisted he didn’t understand the word ‘concern’.
When the WHO was formed as an intergovernmental organisation, it would have been unimaginable that a private foundation could have such influence or set the global health agenda. Though awareness of the GF’s influence over the WHO and Gavi is growing, what is less well documented is its extensive reach closer to home and its control over British science, medicine and public health. This I will be reporting on in the coming days.
