Time to Abandon WHO and its vested interest global vaccine agenda
The beleaguered World Health Organization is pressuring low-income member states in Geneva over its plan to run the global infrastructure for future pandemics.
Agreeing a draft treaty caused significant division last year, but now the annexes of that draft have to be agreed or it will not be adopted and will not then apply to members.
There are two particular dividing lines. The first is a coalition of developing nations arguing that the proposed deal is the latest example of the WHO’s agenda of working for Western pharma companies and their investors, diverting funding from more critical needs like fighting malaria and TB. They bridle at a power structure they regard as neo-colonial. The problem stems from the loss of sovereignty all WHO members risk when they hand basic healthcare policy to a multilateral global organisation.
By capturing the WHO decision-making, any one group, be it Big Pharma or China, can then bring irresistible pressure on healthcare programmes in members states. It can mean the difference from focusing on national priorities to prioritising the health agendas of others, such as prohibitions on alcohol or certain ingredients for foods.
The WHO is also facing a second significant pressure from developed countries. The US has cut all funding for the WHO, and the German authorities have slashed support for the Berlin-based pandemic monitoring unit. As a result a quarter of the WHO’s staff have lost their jobs. The 2026-2027 WHO budget is set at $4.2billion (£3.1billion), but the body is short by nearly 45 per cent of the funding it needs even on this reduced budget, according to Health Policy Watch. This presents an opportunity as the WHO is now ever more reliant on big non-state donors like Bill Gates (16.8 per cent) and the EU (11.5 per cent). The UK (5.5 per cent) is now the highest-paying state, ahead of Germany (5.3 per cent) and even the World Bank (4.3 per cent).
As a result, the WHO’s policymaking is increasingly steered by the billionaire Gates and Big Pharma. Some 80 per cent of the WHO’s funding is earmarked for specific projects chosen by its donors. So, instead of clinical need deciding priorities, Gates and Big Pharma are able to prioritise their issues, particularly centred around pandemics and profit-driving vaccinations.
Over recent years polio alone, driven by Gates, has accounted for 20 per cent of the WHO’s total expenditure. Today around 27 per cent of the WHO’s budget is being spent through the polio and Gavi vaccine programmes which Gates set up and over which he has de facto control.
His influence is magnified by his network of quasi-diplomatic offices across Europe, including his foundation’s London outpost in Westminster. These ‘embassies’ are used to influence the funnelling of national contributions to the WHO into Gates’s priorities. Health expert David McCoy speaks of an atmosphere of ‘self-censorship and the stifling of diverse views among scientists’ who are afraid to voice criticism for fear of being denied funding.
Gates’s focus on vaccines is music to the ears of pharma executives. The industry helps fund the WHO but its main influence comes through other channels. It sits on the boards of Gates’s public-private partnerships and has for decades focused on getting its products on to the WHO’s Essential Medicines List. Medecins Sans Frontieres said of Gavi funding that ‘Pfizer and GSK have reaped more than their fair share of donor money.’
The industry has spent decades finessing its de facto regulatory and institutional capture of the WHO. There are also patient group proxies that are portrayed as independent civil society voices in WHO consultations. Having shaped the WHO’s global policies, Big Pharma then gets access to further funding streams when the polices are adopted by other grant-giving bodies like the IMF and the World Bank. The overall impact for global health policy is a gravitational pull toward interventions that require patented products — vaccines, branded drugs, diagnostics — and away from interventions that do not: clean water, nutrition, housing, primary care, and antibiotic management.
Big Pharma did not waste the covid crisis. It used the opportunity to skew WHO budgets towards their vaccines. Developing countries were encouraged to take out massive loans to pay for covid vaccines and the associated lockdowns which were largely unnecessary for their predominantly younger populations. Today the servicing of those loans is estimated to have reduced their health budgets for current diseases by 8.9 per cent, according to the IHME (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation). Nutrition programmes fell by 10.1 per cent during covid. The global response to widespread developing world diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is faltering.
The Pandemic Agreement is viewed by opponents as an attempt to extend the life of the covid vaccine industry in the guise of pandemic preparedness. They believe that the money spent building pandemic surveillance infrastructure and stockpiles is money not spent on malaria, TB, HIV or maternal mortality, or in building health systems and resilience to remove the need for future support. Another controversy is the obligation under the agreement for less developed countries to share pathogens with Western pharma companies which would then be able to patent them into multi-billion-dollar vaccines.
As usual there is no debate in the UK about the many millions of pounds we give annually to the WHO nor what our Government’s priorities should be. It is only when an event like covid arrives and we suddenly find we are tied to the policies and mis-steps of the WHO (masks anyone?), that we suddenly wake up to how we gave away our ability to decide our own healthcare planning to bureaucrats influenced by foreign powers, the agendas of billionaire philanthropists and Big Pharma’s commercial imperatives.
Britain’s public health needs to become more accountable, and the best way for that is to raise these issues on the floor of the House and in the various committees that can give time to scrutinise. Only then shall we know what is being signed away in our name and if we are investing or squandering our scarce resources.
source www.conservativewoman.co.uk