The Indoctrinators, Part 3: Bill Gates
This is the third in our series about four well-known men whose purposeful social engineering over the years has undermined national democracies and economies, and created fertile ground for the final realisation of their post democracy dream of a global socialist/fascist world, controlled by supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of course, themselves. They are George Soros (you can read Tuesday’s article here), Klaus Schwab (yesterday’s article is here), Bill Gates (today) and David Attenborough.
By Karen Harradine | TCW Defending Freedom | April 13, 2023
BILL Gates has a messiah complex. His obsession with ‘climate change’, vaccines and people control is proving dangerous for the world. Only a few weeks ago he gave voice to his latest megalomaniac plan for a global pandemic prison state. And as the past proves, what Gates wants he usually gets.
Together with his fellow Indoctrinators, George Soros and Klaus Schwab, 67-year-old Gates has not missed the opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis (which he helped to engineer) to further his revolutionist ‘global development’ green agenda. Following their precedent, he too created a foundation through which to impose his ghastly visions on an unfortunate world.
Since its inception in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), under its philanthropic guise, has found plenty of useful idiots across world governments willing to fund and support it. Successive witless British Prime Ministers, up to and including Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, have fallen under his spell with Gates hugely benefiting from this priceless endorsement and publicity. Given his malign agenda, Western taxpayers have literally been paying for their own demise.
Gates is an enthusiastic partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and attendee at their gatherings in Davos, which he typically uses to announce his latest plans to drain the West of its resources to fund his vaccine and climate change lunacy. In 1999, he formed the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which he cleverly partnered with the United Nations (UN), BMGF, foreign aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies. It was to become, together with the BMGF, the second biggest source of funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
More than 80 per cent of the WHO’s budget comes from voluntary contributions by member states and donors. In 2021, the BMGF was the second largest contributor with $375million, and GAVI the fourth with $245million. Both have a long history of influencing the WHO (the BMGF’s first donation was in1998). Uniquely the BMGF became its official partner in 2017, further focusing the WHO’s public health priorities on to vaccines. An enabler of and publicist for the toxic Covid-19 vaccine, his close connection with the WHO has reaped him huge profits.
The WHO’s deeply disturbing proposed Pandemic Treaty effectively puts into action Gates’s planned grasp for global control as he detailed in his 2022 book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic’. It has been long in the planning.
In 2003, on a Davos panel called ‘Science for the Global Good’, Gates announced his foundation’s gift of $200million to the US National Institutes of Health to set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health, a vehicle for shifting US tax money into the developing world in pursuit of Gates’s own interests.
In 2010, Gates and his wife heralded a ‘decade of vaccines’ at Davos, pledging $10billion to fund vaccines in ‘poor countries’, a vaccine zealotry which has had some appalling outcomes for which Gates has expressed no remorse. In one example, nearly half a million children in India were paralysed after taking BMGF-funded polio vaccine. Despite such appalling consequences, Gates, with an honorary knighthood in the bag from the Queen, is still widely regarded as a benign philanthropist. There’s no doubt that money buys reputation.
Like Soros, Gates has a prominent platform on the WEF website to promote green investments worth billions of dollars. A devotee of the UN’s Agenda 2030, Gates is co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Today, thanks to our unprincipled politicians, Gates has a hotline to Downing Street and Britain finds itself in the clutches of a megalomaniac. His tentacles reach far and wide, from shaping energy policies and dominating scientific organisations and academic research, to financing the mainstream media.
In 1997, Tony Blair invited him into Downing Street to sell his flawed computer system, going on to host him several times, implementing policies based on his dictates and in his financial interests. It was an association Blair was to prosper from, later getting $3.2million for his Global Africa initiative and more than $25.2million for his Institute of Global Change.
In 2010, Gates and his wife visited the Department for International Development (DFID) to hector ministers on supporting foreign aid while promoting his Living Proof project, funded also by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Billionaires persuading politicians to plunder public resources to fund their own megalomaniac ambitions is not just deeply distasteful but wrong. Yet between 2011 and 2019, Gates got DFID to give over £60million for BMGF development projects.
In 2016, George Osborne pledged £2.5billion to another BMGF association, the Ross Fund. Three years later, the BMGF and World Bank ‘partnered’ with DFID to shovel more taxpayers’ money to foreign despots in the name of ‘education systems’.
In November 2020, after Johnson played his part in the hysteria over Covid-19, Gates met him and pharmaceutical companies and plotted how to prevent ‘pandemics’. Johnson then gave £800million to the BMGF’s vaccine initiative, COVAX.
A year later, Johnson reunited with Gates and promised a further £400million to fund his green investments.
In Sunak Gates has a willing apprentice. In February, the pair met to discuss wasting more money on Gates’s terrifying ‘climate change’ goals.
The BMGF and its subsidiaries like the Global Fund, which promotes the ominous sounding ‘health security’, has, since its inception in 2002, managed to extract an astonishing £4.5billion from the UK government, with another £1billion earmarked for the next two years. When did British taxpayers vote for that?
Millions today in this country can no longer afford both food and energy costs, they are medically neglected and live in substandard housing. Questions must be asked why politicians are funding this Indoctrinator to dictate policies that are provenly detrimental to British citizens and are only to the benefit of one man. The multi- billionaire land owner, Bill Gates. If a vampire is invited into a home, best be prepared for a bloodbath.
The last in this series will focus on green evangelist Sir David Attenborough.
Rockefeller Foundation, Nonprofits Spending Millions on Behavioral Psychology Research to ‘Nudge’ More People to Get COVID Vaccines
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 13, 2022
The Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation (an “independent” agency of the U.S. government) and other nonprofits are pouring millions of dollars into a research initiative “to increase uptake of COVID-19 vaccines and other recommended public health measures by countering mis- and disinformation.”
In conjunction with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Rockefeller Foundation last month announced $7.2 million in funding for the Mercury Project, initially launched in November 2021, under the slogan, “Together, we can build a healthier information environment.”
The funds will support 12 teams of researchers in 17 countries who will conduct studies on “ambitious, applied social and behavioral science to combat the growing global threat posed by low COVID-19 vaccination rates and public health mis- and disinformation,” the Rockefeller Foundation said.
The Rockefeller Foundation and the SSRC claim the aim of the Mercury Project, whose name is derived from the ancient Roman god of messages and communication, is to bolster public health and safety.
However, some critics described the project as one based on “propaganda” aimed at “nudging” the unvaccinated to get vaccinated.
Creating ‘behavioral change’ by targeting schoolchildren and specific socio-economic groups
Behavioral change lies at the heart of the Mercury Project, which will issue three-year research grants to estimate “the causal impacts of mis- and disinformation on online and offline outcomes in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic,” including “differential impacts across socio-demographic groups.”
The research will include “interventions that target the producers or the consumers of mis- and disinformation, or that increase confidence in reliable information.”
Some of the “interventions” proffered by the Rockefeller Foundation include “literacy training for secondary school students” to “help students identify COVID-19 vaccine misinformation,” “equipping trusted messengers with communication strategies to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand” and “using social networks to share tailored, community-developed messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand.”
This information will, according to the Rockefeller Foundation, “provide evidence about what works — and doesn’t — in specific places and for specific groups to increase COVID-19 vaccination take-up.”
But according to ZeroHedge, the research groups funded by the Mercury Project “are operating with the intent to tailor vaccination narratives to fit different ethnic and political backgrounds, looking for the key to the gates of each cultural kingdom and convincing them to take the jab.”
The project uses “ambiguous language and mission statements” to at least partially conceal the project’s main purpose of “using behavioral psychology and mass psychology elements to understand the global resistance to the recent COVID compliance efforts,” ZeroHedge reported.
‘Fabricating effective COVID propaganda’ a ‘money train’ for behavioral researchers and psychologists
In November 2021, the Mercury Project received an initial $7.5 million in seed funding from entities including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to apply “the principles of large-scale, team-based science to the problem of vaccination demand” over a three-year period.
As of August 2022, these entities have funded the Mercury Project to the tune of $10.25 million.
In June, the project received $20 million from the National Science Foundation to study “interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccination demand and other positive health behaviors.”
The SSRC’s latest call for proposals, under the aegis of the Mercury Project, received nearly 200 submissions.
The accepted proposals come from researchers in countries including the U.S., Canada, Côte d’Ivoire, England, France, Ghana, Haiti, Kenya, India, Malawi, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Spain, Rwanda and Tanzania.
U.S.-based researchers represent institutions including Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, MIT, New York University, Rutgers, St. Augustine University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, Vanderbilt and Yale.
The titles of some of the projects most recently funded by the Mercury Project include:
- “A tough call: Impacts of mobile technology on Covid-19 (mis)information and protective behavior decision-making.”
- “Boosting boosters at scale: A megastudy to increase vaccination at scale.”
- “Building a better toolkit (for fighting misinformation): Large collaborative project to compare misinformation interventions.”
- “Harnessing influencers to counter misinformation: Scalable solutions in the Global South.”
- “Targeting health misinformation networks: Network-transforming interventions for reducing the spread of health misinformation online.”
Arguing in favor of the importance of the project’s research, Anna Harvey, president of the SSRC, stated:
“With COVID-19 prevalent and rapidly evolving everywhere, there is a pressing need to identify interventions with the potential to increase vaccination take-up.
“Vaccines are only effective if they become vaccinations; vaccines are a scientific marvel but their potential is unfulfilled if they are left on the shelf.”
Describing the Mercury Project’s grantees, Dr. Bruce Gellin, the Rockefeller Foundation’s chief of global public health strategy, said:
“This initial cohort’s ideas exemplify the creativity and vision behind the Mercury Project. They go far beyond quick fixes, with the goal of identifying robust, cost-effective, and meaningful solutions that can be widely adopted and scaled.
“We hope that more, better, and science-based knowledge about what we need to do will lead to increased uptake of reliable information — and serve as a powerful counter to the effects of misinformation and disinformation on vaccine demand.”
Heather Lanthorn, the Mercury Project’s program director, highlighted the importance of leveraging communication toward achieving public health objectives:
“The viral, vaccine, and information environments are all rapidly evolving–but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to make progress towards more effective and equitable responses.
“By funding projects on the ground around the world, this work will help us understand what works where, and why, and identify new ways to harness the power of connection and communication to advance public health goals.”
ZeroHedge, however, countered that behind all the rhetoric, the focus of the Mercury Project, is “propaganda, propaganda and propaganda,” and “the very basis of the existence of the Mercury Project presupposes that individuals cannot be trusted to make up their own minds about the information they are exposed to.”
The expectation is that individuals “must be molded to accept the mainstream narrative,” ZeroHedge said, while presupposing that “mainstream or establishment information is always trustworthy and unbiased.”
“Fabricating effective COVID propaganda is becoming a money train for the small groups of behavioral researchers and psychologists that jump onboard,” ZeroHedge added.
GAVI: 200 global ‘nudge units’ specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life
The field of behavioral science — and a concept known as “nudging” — figured prominently during the years of the COVID-19 pandemic and were heavily utilized by governments and public health officials throughout the world to justify often stringent restrictions and countermeasures.
Nudging was defined in a bestselling 2008 book by economist Richard H. Thaler and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein — “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness” — as something that “alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
Thaler and Sunstein presented nudging as a technocratic solution for tricky policy issues involving a perceived need to encourage, in a “voluntary manner,” policies or measures that would otherwise be unpopular.
Their work drew from a 1974 paper by two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, which, as explained by an article published by GAVI-The Vaccine Alliance, “pioneered the study of mental shortcuts that humans rely on to make decisions, known as heuristics.”
As previously reported by The Defender, the Rockefeller Foundation is also a partner and board member and donor to GAVI, alongside the WEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which hosted Event 201, which simulated the spread of a coronavirus just prior to the actual COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2010, the U.K. government established the Behavioural Insights Team, initially within the government’s Cabinet Office, before it was spun off as a private company in 2014. A year later, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order to promote the utilization of behavioral science in federal policymaking.
According to GAVI, “globally, there are now more than 200 teams, or nudge units, that specialize in applying behavioral science to everyday life.”
COVID-19, and the response to it, was no exception. HRW Healthcare’s Tony Jiang described nudges as “a set of policy tools which utilize psychological insights to attempt to motivate people to adopt certain desired actions/behaviours, without having to enforce strict laws, bans, or punishments,” and as a means to “motivate people into making responsible decisions, while preserving individual liberty.”
According to Jiang, “at the beginning of the pandemic, to encourage COVID-safe behaviours, behavioural nudges were the preferred policy by governments in the UK, USA, and Australia.”
According to Jay Van Bavel, associate professor of psychology at New York University, “as COVID-19 infections grew exponentially in 2020, behavioral scientists wanted to help. Nudges presented a possible route to controlling the virus, particularly in the absence of vaccines and evidence-based treatments.”
Van Bavel, along with Sunstein and 40 other researchers, in 2020 published a paper in Nature presenting ways in which behavioral science and nudging could contribute to efforts to combat COVID-19, including through fostering increased trust in government and fighting “conspiracy theories.”
As explained by GAVI, “as scientists learned more about how the coronavirus spread … governments knew what they wanted their citizens to do, but they still had to think carefully about how to encourage people to change their behavior. That’s where nudges could help.”
This was evidenced, for instance, in a March 14, 2020, U.K. government document published approximately two weeks before the U.K. government imposed a nationwide lockdown.
The document presented the role that would be played by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies in advising the U.K. government’s response.
The document referenced the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic and the advice the advisory group received at the time from a subgroup known as the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour and Communications. This group was reconvened on Feb. 13, 2020, with an exclusive focus on behavioral psychology.
According to the document, the group was “asked to provide advice aimed at anticipating and helping people adhere to interventions that are recommended by medical or epidemiological experts,” concluding that the U.K. government should “provide clear and transparent reasons for the different strategies that might be taken.”
The group advised the U.K. government that “in order to increase confidence in, and adherence to, the interventions should provide clear and transparent reasons for the strategies that have and have not been selected … and conduct rapid research into how best to help people adhere to the recommendations” whilst suggesting “behaviours that reduce risk.”
Other studies in the 2020-2021 period also highlighted the potential role nudging and behavioral psychology could play in relation to COVID-19.
For instance, a 2021 study showed that sending text messages to patients before scheduled primary care visits increased flu vaccinations by 5%, while another 2021 study found that the same strategy boosted COVID-19 vaccination appointments by 6% and actual vaccinations by 3.6%.
Still another 2021 study, also published in Nature, found that “behavioural nudges increase COVID-19 vaccinations,” arguing that “overcoming vaccine hesitancy … requires effective communication strategies” and finding that “inducing feelings of ownership over vaccines” can help bring about an increase in vaccine uptake.
The National Science Foundation offered grants of $200,000 for research in this field, while the SSRC also issued a call for proposals, receiving 1,300 applications even though it had sufficient funding for only 62.
However, as the pandemic progressed and as vaccination figures eventually plateaued, the strategy of nudging began to be called into question.
Dena Gromet, executive director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, said nudging is effective only if individuals are already inclined to perform the action that they are being reminded or encouraged to perform.
Nudging, as a result, was supplanted by vaccine mandates.
Indeed, such “sterner measures” were advocated by Richard Thaler, one of the creators of the concept of nudging. In an August 2021 New York Times op-ed, Thaler called for stricter measures for the unvaccinated, including vaccine passports and isolation — measures which he described as “pushes and shoves” instead of nudges.
Two studies performed by researchers at King’s College London also cast doubt on the effectiveness of nudging to change behaviors and attitudes in relation to COVID-19.
Notably, the dedicated COVID-19 page on the website of the Behavioral Insights Team, which had played such a key role in advising the U.K. government on its COVID-19-related countermeasures early in the pandemic, has not featured a new posting since April 28, 2021.
However, some believe there still remains a role for nudging as the world enters a “new phase” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tony Jiang argued that “as mandates relax, a greater reliance on individual compliance is required if we are to prevent mass-outbreaks in the future.”
“This makes the role of nudges and behavioural science ever more crucial,” he said, suggesting that going forward, nudges can be utilized to encourage mask-wearing, vaccinations and boosters.
Jiang proffered suggestions such as personalized masks that “can be more fashionable,” and for vaccinations, the potential role of “defaults,” where “people are automatically enrolled to receive a booster and must deliberately cancel the scheduled appointment if they do not wish to receive it.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
WHO’S DRIVING THE PANDEMIC EXPRESS?
By Dr David Bell and Emma McArthur | PANDA | September 4, 2022
Sceptics of the growing ‘pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’ (PPR) agenda celebrated recently, heralding a perceived ‘defeat’ of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) controversial amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). Although the proposed amendments would have undoubtedly expanded the WHO’s powers, this focus on the WHO reflects a narrow view of global health and the pandemic industry. The WHO is almost a bit-player in a much larger game of public-private partnerships and financial incentives that are driving the pandemic gravy train forward.
While the WHO works in the spotlight, the pandemic industry has been growing for over a decade and its expansion accelerates unabated. Other major players such as the World Bank, coalitions of wealthy nations at the G7 and G20 and their corporate partners work in a world less subject to transparency; a world where the rules are more relaxed, and a conflict of interest receives less scrutiny.
If the global health community is to preserve public health, it must urgently understand the wider process that is underway and take action to stop it. The pandemic express must be halted by the weight of evidence and basic principles of public health.
Funding a global pandemic bureaucracy
“The FIF could be a cornerstone in the construction of a truly global PPR system in the context of the International Treaty on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response, sponsored by the World Health Assembly.” (WHO, 19 April 2022)
The world is being told to fear pandemics. Ballooning socio-economic costs of the COVID-19 crisis are touted as justification for increased focus on PPR funding.
Calls for ‘urgent’ collective action to avert the ‘next’ pandemic are predicated on systemic ‘weaknesses’ supposedly exposed by COVID-19. As the WHO steamed ahead with its push for a new pandemic ‘treaty’ during 2021, G20 members agreed to establish a Joint Finance & Health Task Force (JFHTF) to ‘enhance the collaboration and global cooperation on issues relating to pandemic prevention, preparedness and response’.
A World Bank-WHO report prepared for the G20 joint task force estimates that US$ 31.1 billion will be required annually for future PPR, including US $ 10.5 billion per year in new international financing to support perceived funding gaps in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Surveillance-related activities comprise almost half of this, with US $4.1 billion in new funding required to address perceived gaps in the system.
In public health terms, the funding proposed to expand the global PPR infrastructure is enormous. By contrast, the WHO’s approved biennium programme budget for 2022-2023 averages US $3.4 billion per year. The Global Fund, the main international funder of malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS – which have a combined annual mortality of over 2.5 million – currently dispenses just US $ 4 billion annually for the three diseases combined. Unlike COVID-19, these diseases cause significant mortality in lower income countries and in younger age groups, year in, year out.
In April 2022, the G20 agreed to establish a new ‘financial intermediary fund’ (FIF) housed at the World Bank, to address the US $10.5 billion PPR financing gap. The FIF is intended to build upon existing pandemic funding to ‘strengthen health systems and PPR capacities in low-income and middle-income countries and regions’. The WHO is predicted to be the technical lead, landing them with an assured role irrespective of the outcome of current ‘treaty’ discussions.
The establishment of the fund has proceeded with breathtaking speed, and it was approved on June 30 by the World Bank Board of Executive Directors. A short period of consultation precedes an expected launch in September 2022. To date, donations totalling US $1.3 billion dollars have been pledged by governments, the European Commission and various private and non-government interests, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. The initial areas for the fund are somewhat all-encompassing, including country-level ‘disease surveillance; laboratory systems; emergency communication, coordination and management; critical health workforce capacities; and community engagement’.
In scope, the fund has the appearance of a new ‘World Health Organization’ for pandemics – to add to the existing (and ever-expanding) network of global health organisations such as the WHO; Gavi; the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); and the Global Fund. But is this increased expenditure on PPR justified? Are the escalating socio-economic costs of COVID-19 due to a failure to act by the global health community, as is widely claimed; or are they due to negligent acts of failure by the WHO and global governments, when they discarded previous evidenced-based pandemic guidelines?
COVID-19: failure to act or acts of failure?
In the debate surrounding the growing pandemic industry, much attention is being directed towards the central role of the WHO. This attention is understandable given the WHO’s position as the agency responsible for global public health and its push for a new international pandemic agreement.
However, the WHO’s handling of the response to COVID-19 creates serious doubts about the competency of its leadership and raises questions about whose needs the organisation is serving.
The WHO’s failure to follow its own pre-existing pandemic guidelines by supporting lockdowns, mass-testing, border closures and the multi-billion-dollar COVAX mass-vaccination program, has generated vast revenue for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry, whose corporations and investors are major contributors to the WHO. This approach has crippled economies, damaged existing health programs and further entrenched poverty in low-income countries. Decades of progress in children’s health are likely to be undone, together with the destruction of the long-term prospects of tens of millions of children, through loss of education, forced child marriage and malnutrition. In abandoning its principles of equality and community-driven healthcare, the WHO appears to have become a mere pawn in the PPR game, beholden to those with the real power; the entities who are providing its income and who control the resources now being directed to this area.
Corporatizing global public health
Recently established health agencies devoted to vaccination and pandemics, such as Gavi and CEPI, appear to have been highly influential from the beginning. CEPI, is the brainchild of Bill Gates, Jeremy Farrar (director of the Wellcome Trust), and others at the pro-lockdown World Economic Forum. Launched at Davos in 2017, CEPI was created to help drive the market for epidemic vaccines. It is no secret that Bill Gates has major private financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, in addition to those of his foundation. This clearly places a question mark over the philanthropic nature of his investments.
CEPI appears to be a forerunner of what the WHO is increasingly becoming – an instrument where individuals and corporations can exert influence and improve returns by hijacking key areas of public health. CEPI’s business model, which involves taxpayers taking most of the financial risk for vaccine research and development whilst big pharma gets all the profits, is notably replicated in the World Bank-WHO report.
Gavi, itself a significant WHO donor that exists solely to increase access to vaccination, is also under direct influence of Bill Gates, via the Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation. Gavi’s involvement (alongside CEPI) with the WHO’s COVAX program, which diverted vast resources into COVID-19 mass-vaccination in countries where COVID-19 is a relatively small disease burden, suggests the organisation is tied more strongly to vaccine sales than genuine public health outcomes.
Pandemic funding – ignoring the big picture?
At first glance, increased PPR funding to LMICs may seem a public good. The World Bank-WHO report claims that ‘the frequency and impact of pandemic-prone pathogens are increasing.’ However, this is belied by reality, as the WHO lists only 5 ‘pandemics’ in the past 120 years, with the highest mortality occurring in the 1918-19 H1N1 (‘Spanish’) influenza pandemic, before antibiotics and modern medicine. Apart from COVID-19, the ‘Swine Flu’ outbreak in 2009-10, which killed less people than a normal flu year, is the only ‘pandemic’ in the past 50 years.
Such a myopic focus on pandemic risk will do little to address the most serious causes of illness and death, and it can be expected to make matters worse for people experiencing the most extreme forms of socio-economic disadvantage.
Governments of low-income countries will be ‘incentivised’ to divert resources to PPR related programs, further increasing the growing debt crisis. A more centralised, top-down public health system will lack the flexibility to meet local and regional needs. Transferring support from higher burden diseases, and drivers of economic growth, has a direct impact on mortality in these countries, particularly for children.
The WHO-World Bank report states that the pillars of the global PPR architecture must be built on the ‘foundational principles of equity, inclusion and solidarity’. As severe pandemics occur less than once per generation, increased spending on PPR in LMICs clearly violates these basic principles as it diverts scarce resources away from areas of regional need, to address the perceived health priorities of wealthier populations. As demonstrated by the damage caused by the COVID-19 response, in both high and low-income countries, the overall harm of resource diversion from areas of greater need is likely to be universal. In failing to address such ‘opportunity costs’, recommendations by the WHO, the World Bank, and other PPR partners cannot be validly based in public health; nor are they a basis for overall societal benefit. .
One thing is certain. Those who will gain from this expanding pandemic gravy train will be those who gained from the response to COVID-19.
The pandemic gravy train – following the money
The new World Bank fund risks compounding existing problems in the global public health system and further compromising the WHO’s autonomy; although it is stated that the WHO will have a central ‘strategic role’, funds will be channelled through the World Bank. In essence, it financially side-steps the accountability measures at the WHO, where questions of relative worth can be raised more easily.
The proposed structure of the FIF will pave the way for organisations with strong ties to pharmaceutical and other biotech industries, such as CEPI and Gavi, to gain even greater influence over global PPR, particularly if they are appointed ‘implementing entities’ – the operational arms that will carry out the FIF’s work program at country, regional and global level.
Although the initial implementing entities for the FIF will be UN agencies, multilateral development banks and the IMF, plans are already underway to accredit these other international health entities. Investments are likely to be heavily skewed towards biotechnological solutions, such as disease surveillance and vaccine development, at the cost of other, more pressing, public health interventions.
Protecting public health rather than private wealth
If the world truly wants to address the systemic weakness exposed by COVID-19, it must first understand that this pandemic gravy train is not new; the foundations for the destruction of community- and country-based global public health began long before COVID-19.
It is unarguable that COVID-19 has proved to be a lucrative cash cow for vaccine manufacturers and the biotech industry. The public-private partnership model that now dominates global health enabled vast resources to be channelled into the pockets of corporate giants, through programs they directly influence, or even run. CEPI’s ‘100 days Mission’ to make ‘safe and effective’ vaccines against ‘viral threats’ within 100 days – to ‘give the world a fighting chance of containing a future outbreak before it spreads to become a global pandemic’ – is a permit for pharmaceutical companies to appropriate public money on an unprecedented scale, based on their own assessments of risk.
The self-fulfilment of the ‘increasing frequency of pandemic’ prophecy will be ensured by the push for increased disease surveillance – a priority area for the FIF. To quote the World Bank-WHO report:
“COVID-19 highlighted the need to connect surveillance and alert systems into a regional and global network to detect zoonotic transmission events, raise the alarm early to enable a swift public health response, and accelerate the development of medical countermeasures.”
Like many claims being made about COVID-19, this claim has no evidence base – the origins of COVID-19 remain highly controversial and the WHO’s data demonstrate that pandemics are uncommon, whatever their origin. None of the ‘countermeasures’ have been shown to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19, which is now globally endemic.
Increased surveillance will naturally identify more ‘potentially dangerous pathogens’, as variants of viruses arise constantly in nature. Consequently, the world faces a never-ending game of seek and ye shall find, with never-ending profits for industry. Formerly once per generation, this industry will make ‘pandemics’ a routine part of life, where rapid fire vaccines are mandated for every new disease or variant that arrives.
Ultimately, this new pandemic fund will help to hook low- and middle-income countries into the growing global pandemic bureaucracy. Greater centralisation of public health will do little to address the genuine health needs of people in these countries. If the pandemic gravy train is allowed to keep growing, the poor will get poorer, and people will die in increasing numbers from more prevalent, preventable diseases. The rich will continue to profit, while fuelling the main driver of ill-health in lower income countries – poverty.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
U.S. Declares Monkeypox Health Emergency, FDA Offers Vaccine to Some Kids Despite No Clinical Trials
By Megan Redshaw | The Defender | August 5, 2022
The U.S. declared monkeypox a public health emergency to raise awareness and allow for additional funding to fight the disease’s spread, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said on Thursday.
“We’re prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus,” Becerra said.
Becerra said he also is considering a second declaration that would allow federal officials to expedite medical countermeasures — such as potential treatments and vaccines — designed to ensure drugs are safe and effective.
President Biden said in a tweet he remained “committed to our monkeypox response: ramping-up vaccine distribution, expanding testing, and educating at-risk communities.”
“That’s why today’s public health emergency declaration on the virus is critical to confronting this outbreak with the urgency it warrants,” Biden said.
The last time the U.S. declared a public health emergency was in January 2020, for COVID-19.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 7,100 cases of monkeypox have been reported in the U.S., including five cases in children.
Symptoms of monkeypox infection are usually mild and include fever, rash and swollen lymph nodes, and occasionally intense headache, back pain, muscle aches, lack of energy and skin eruptions that can cause painful lesions, scabs or crusts.
The virus is rarely fatal and no deaths have been reported in the U.S.
Monkeypox primarily is spread through skin-to-skin contact during sex and affects mostly gay and bisexual men, public health officials say, although the virus can affect anyone.
According to the CDC, about 98% of monkeypox patients who provided demographic information to clinics identified as men who have sex with men.
Public health emergency paves way for vaccine for kids
Now that the Biden administration has declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) can move to issue an Emergency Use Authorization for the JYNNEOS vaccine for children under 18.
There are two vaccines that may be used “for the prevention” of monkeypox virus infection: JYNNEOS — also known as Imvamune or Imvanex — and ACAM2000, which is licensed by the FDA for use against smallpox and “made available for use against monkeypox under an Expanded Access Investigational New Drug application.”
The FDA told ABC News on Thursday that while the current monkeypox vaccine, JYNNEOS, is approved only for adults ages 18 and older, it will be available for kids on a case-by-case basis.
The JYNNEOS vaccine, delivered in a two-dose series, was not tested through clinical trials in children.
However, the FDA confirmed to ABC News that “numerous” children have been granted access to the vaccine through a special permission process, but declined to state exactly how many children have received the vaccine to date through this process.
“If a doctor decides a person under 18 was exposed to monkeypox and the benefit of the vaccine is greater than any potential risk, they can submit a request to the FDA,” ABC News reported.
According to the CDC, the “immune response” takes “14 days after the second dose of JYNNEOS and 4 weeks after the ACAM2000 dose for maximal development.”
The CDC website also states: “No data are available yet on the effectiveness of these vaccines in the current outbreak.”
According to the latest data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), between June 14 and July 21, 2022, 31 adverse events were reported following vaccination with JYNNEOS — manufactured by Bavarian Nordic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) declared monkeypox a global health emergency after more than 26,000 cases were reported across 87 countries.
A global emergency is the WHO’s highest level of alert, but the designation does not necessarily mean a disease is particularly transmissible or lethal.
The U.S. makes up 25% of confirmed cases globally although the U.K. was the first to alert the world to the outbreak in May after confirming several cases.
A monkeypox fictional simulation was held in March 2021
As The Defender reported in May, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, in conjunction with the Munich Security Conference, in March 2021 held a “tabletop exercise on reducing high-consequence biological threats,” involving an “unusual strain of monkeypox virus that first emerged in the fictional nation of Brinia and spread globally over 18 months.”
This is similar to “Event 201,” a “high-level pandemic exercise” organized by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, along with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak — that mirrored what later followed with COVID-19 pandemic.
According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the monkeypox exercise, which was “developed in consultation with technical and policy experts,” brought together “19 senior leaders and experts from across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe with decades of combined experience in public health, biotechnology industry, international security, and philanthropy.”
The fictional start date of the monkeypox pandemic in this exercise was May 15, 2022. The first European case of monkeypox was identified on May 7, 2022.
Key participants in the simulation included Johnson & Johnson and Janssen, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, GAVI — the Vaccine Alliance, Merck and the WHO.
Several of the participants listed above also “participated” in Event 201.
Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.
© 2022 Children’s Health Defense, Inc. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of Children’s Health Defense, Inc. Want to learn more from Children’s Health Defense? Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. Your donation will help to support us in our efforts.
The Vaccine Cajolers, Part 1: How jab zealots set out to stifle sceptics
THIS is the first of a special five-part investigation into the way in which, and why, winning ‘vaccine confidence’ became the primary goal of world health agencies, regardless of need, efficacy or risk.
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | May 11, 2022
Since the UK’s Covid-19 vaccine programme began in December 2020, 140million doses have been administered to 55million people, representing 73 per cent of the population.
The high level of acceptance of these vaccines, which were developed in one tenth of the normal time frame – and in the case of the mRNA vaccines using a novel technology never previously licensed for use in either humans or animals – is a remarkable testament to the level of public trust in vaccines.
It is arguably the end product of two decades of work, first by GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisations (now called The Vaccine Alliance) and recently by initiatives such as that of the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, established to deliver the goal of universal childhood vaccination set 40 years ago by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s welfare organisation.
GAVI was set up in 1999 ‘to save children’s lives and protect people’s health through the widespread use of safe vaccines, with a particular focus on the needs of developing countries.’
It was founded at the instigation of Dr Seth Berkeley, its current CEO, who was then working for the Rockefeller Foundation. ‘We will have an outside body that can bring in industry (which the World Health Organisation can’t legally do), do advocacy and build a truly international alliance,’ he said.
The Vaccine Alliance, a public-private partnership financed by vaccine manufacturers, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and national governments, aimed to give impetus to the universal vaccination campaign and to revitalise the fortunes of a stagnating market for new vaccines. The UK government is currently is largest single donor, having made a five-year pledge in 2020 of £1.65billion.
Its initial focus was on gaining the ‘long-term commitment of client governments and donors to full immunisation’, the latter implying vaccination on schedule and for every possible disease. This was different to its twin, the concept of universal vaccination.
When GAVI was launched, a UNICEF employee and anthropologist, Dr Heidi Larson – who would later found the Vaccine Confidence Project – was chosen to lead its vaccine communications and advocacy work.
She later explained how the nature of the advocacy was soon to evolve away from the initial focus on client governments.
‘There was a growing epidemic of individuals and communities and even some government officials questioning and refusing vaccines,’ she said. ‘I ended up getting the nickname “Director of UNICEF’s Fire Department,” because it turned out to be a crisis management position, because people weren’t taking vaccines.
‘I saw what seemed to be a trend: The northern Nigeria boycott of the polio program made it into the international press, but it wasn’t one place, it was everywhere.
‘I didn’t have time in my day job to investigate what was going on there, because there was not a quick fix. That’s when I put together a proposal and got some seed money and founded the Vaccine Confidence Project.’
There is no seminal document laying out a case for universal vaccination. As a public policy objective, it originated with the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). Its end goal is to eradicate diseases one-by-one via vaccination, the so-called vertical approach to public health introduced by the RF soon after its founding in 1913. It was part of a package of cheap, technological quick fixes for health care in developing countries originally called Selective Primary Health Care.
These interim measures were necessary because matching the industrialised world’s standards of sanitation, clean water, nutrition and health care to reduce the disease burden was ‘prohibitively expensive’.
An RF trustee, James P Grant, had been appointed executive director of UNICEF in 1980, operating it as a rival to the vaccine-agnostic World Health Organisation of his era.
In 1980, in an article on the eradication of smallpox, WHO director-general Dr Halfdan Mahler did not even mention vaccines. Rather, he stressed: ‘Smallpox eradication is a sign, a token, of what can be achieved in breaking out of the cycle of ill-health, disease and poverty.’
But Grant engaged in what the New York Times called ‘tireless, peripatetic proselytising’, using his UNICEF pulpit to zealously promote vaccination.
With rearguard reinforcement from the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC), by 1984 he had brought the WHO, the agency meant to provide the technical lead, on board with ‘universal’ vaccination.
Today, UNICEF is a quasi-arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Figures in its most recent Immunisation Roadmap document show it is now responsible for distributing 40 per cent of vaccines in developing countries, while its 659 staff spend more than half their time managing immunisation programmes and supply chain logistics.
In Part 2 tomorrow, I will explain how GAVI’s ten-year strategic plan, the Decade of the Vaccine, set out to eliminate vaccine scepticism.
How Big Pharma sold vaccines to the world – Part 3
By Paula Jardine | TCW Defending Freedom | February 10, 2022
THE World Health Organisation’s Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP) was developed to help GAVI (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation) achieve its ‘decade of vaccines’ from 2010, helping ‘all individuals and communities enjoy lives free from vaccine-preventable diseases’.
All countries were to make immunisation a strategic priority, requiring more surveillance to ‘strengthen national capacity to formulate evidence-based policies’. There was no aversion to financially incentivising either individuals or healthcare workers to encourage vaccination, despite the potential for conflict of interest.
The primary success metric in the GVAP was that by 2020 there should be at least 90 per cent national vaccination coverage ‘with at least 80 per cent vaccination coverage in every administrative unit for all vaccines in the national immunisation programme’ for the target populations.
Immunisation Information Systems (IIS), national registries to record the who, what and when of vaccination, were established.
The European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC) led a scoping exercise for this in 2016. Systems which would be interoperable with other databases were to be formulated with ‘a heavy design emphasis on generating evidence to support decisions that need to be made at the population level’.
Vaccination coverage is mentioned 81 times in the ECDC report, twice as many times as vaccine safety. The ECDC claims that ‘IIS can help mitigate potential rumours and unfounded concerns through the provision of evidence, including on adverse events following immunisation’.
That may be so, but the only safety signal likely to emerge from an IIS is evidence of secondary vaccine failure – that is, breakthrough disease outbreaks amongst those inoculated against a given disease, requiring a booster vaccination campaign.
The IIS do not exist for safety monitoring (the technical term for which is pharmacovigilance) of the vaccines once they are deployed on the population at large. Pharmacovigilance is the remit of the regulators who license them, not of the public health authorities who monitor vaccination coverage.
In fact, only seven European countries record adverse events to vaccines in their IIS. The UK is not amongst them. Of the seven that do, only Sweden automatically reports them to the regulator who has the power to withdraw unsafe products from use.
Dr David Sencer is the former director of the US government agency the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who lost his job after America’s ill-fated 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign.
He has pointed out that some adverse effects from vaccines become apparent only once the clinical trials conclude and after the vaccine is administered to very large numbers of people.
Sencer’s swine flu program had an active surveillance system for adverse events which he later called a trojan horse as the scale of death and injury led to the vaccination campaign being terminated after three months. Having indemnified the manufacturers because their insurers balked at covering them, the US government paid $135m for swine flu vaccines and an additional $90m in compensation for death or injury – almost as much in compensation over the swine flu vaccine programme as it did rolling it out.
The size of the US government’s 1976 compensation bill perhaps explains why no pharmaceutical regulator in the world has a system that actively monitors for post authorisation adverse events. Instead all regulators rely on passive surveillance through voluntary reports to systems like the Yellow Card system operated by the Medicines and Health Care Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) in the UK.
A vaccine is deemed safe if it passes Phase 1 clinical trials without any ‘unscheduled’ animal deaths or untimely deaths of human subjects and effective if it passes Phase 2 clinical trials.
Products such as the ill-fated Pandemrix flu vaccine – hit by adverse effects in 2009 – may on occasion be withdrawn after licensing. But as a rule, regulators make no active effort to protect consumers at large that might necessitate a product being withdrawn once it is in use.
To facilitate GAVI’s efforts to monitor vaccination coverage rates reliably, the GVAP asks for each individual to be assigned a unique identification number so that the respective health authority can ensure everyone gets every vaccine in ‘time-monitored’ adherence with the vaccine schedules.
In 2013, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded a fingerprint identification system to track vaccinated children in Africa. GAVI, the Rockefeller Foundation and Microsoft subsequently formed the ID2020 alliance in 2016 to promote the global need for secure digital identity.
‘We are currently in the middle of a global identity crisis: Tens of millions of children – especially those living in most remote, impoverished communities – have no formal record of their existence,’ said Dr Seth Berkley, associate director of health sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation, and one of the instigators of GAVI.
‘That represents an enormous impediment to GAVI’s mission of ensuring that every child worldwide receives the essential vaccines they need to survive and thrive.’
He said the pacesetters of GAVI’s initiative called INFUSE (Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunisation) ‘are on the cutting edge of technologies that might help us overcome that challenge’.
Covid-19 has presented another opportunity to fulfil GAVI’s vaccination monitoring mission. Dr Rebecca Weintraub, a board member of Simprints, one of the companies working with it to develop biometric identification solutions for immunisation registries, said: ‘We have a narrow opportunity to set the stage for such fair and sustainable infrastructure across the globe. If done well, we can ensure the promise of the Covid-19 vaccine portfolio leads to future widespread vaccination – and protection – for global populations.’ https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/4-182/v2
However, biometric identification for developing immunisation registries is beginning to morph into something else. The Ada Lovelace Institute, which was set up by partners including the Wellcome Trust in 2018 to ‘ensure that data and AI work for people and society’, calls vaccine passports and Covid status apps ‘systems for verifiably sharing private health data relevant to Covid-19 which could be used to stream society and impose differential lockdown restrictions.
‘This might mean limiting individual access to work, insurance, hospitality and leisure, and other parts of life, based on an individual’s health or risk of Covid-19 infection or transmission.’ In other words, universal vaccination means universal control.
Covid-19 may have brought these passports to public attention, but the idea is not new. In December 2017, the European Commission published a Roadmap on Vaccination.
The first action on the roadmap is to ‘examine the feasibility of developing a common vaccination card/passport for EU citizens (that takes into account potentially different national vaccination schedules and) that is compatible with electronic immunisation information systems and recognised for use across borders, without duplicating work at national level.’
In 2018, the European Health Parliament, a lobby organisation that develops health policy recommendations to ‘rethink European health care’ and whose sponsors include Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, recommended that electronic vaccination passports be established in order to ‘ensure people know and act in their best interests on vaccination’.
The very day the MHRA authorised the use of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the WHO put out a call for experts to develop a so-called Smart Vaccine Certificate programme.
Pharmaceutical revenue growth has been stimulated not only by measures to increase inoculation coverage, but by raising the number of vaccines put on national immunisation schedules.
The ‘child survival revolution’ promoted by the United Nations agency UNICEF began in 1982 with six vaccines. At the time of the first GAVI board meeting in 1999, there were 11 routinely recommended vaccines on the US national immunisation schedule.
GAVI immediately identified a vaccine gap that the developing world needed to close, and its ambition is for immunisation schedules around the world to mirror that of the US.
The goalposts keep moving. When it was updated again in 2013, the US immunisation schedule comprised a total of 52 injections of 17 different vaccines over the course of a person’s lifetime.
Gone are the days when the promise made to parents was that with a single injection their children could avoid infections and be protected for life. The number of boosters continues to increase and now includes a recommendation for adults to have an additional measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
A footnote to the MMR recommendation says: ‘Documentation of (healthcare) provider-diagnosed disease is not considered acceptable evidence of immunity for measles, mumps or rubella.’
The very idea that someone might have acquired lifelong immunity after recovering from an infectious disease is now anathema, unless proven by a laboratory test.
The current UK immunisation schedule is marginally more conservative, both in terms of the total number of vaccines recommended and the number of doses. The most recently updated version, as of November 23, 2021, appeared on the website of the Oxford Vaccine Knowledge Project.
It recommends only three vaccines for adults – flu, pneumococcal and shingles. The three are recommended by Public Health England only for over-65s, or 70 in the case of the shingles vaccine. Despite the controversial mandate for NHS staff to have the Covid-19 vaccine – now withdrawn – the jab is not listed on the schedule.
The Oxford Vaccine Knowledge Project’s medical information is reviewed by Professor Andrew Pollard, chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, and a member of the WHO’s Scientific Advisory Group of Experts Committee.