Only two days earlier, I had reported on how the G20 group of the most important industrial nations let the World Economic Forum, i.e. ultimately by Silicon Valley companies, draw up their digital strategy for “the pandemic and beyond”.
How our governments got to promise to promote and protect US digital companies
Recently, the EU Commission and the German government held a donor conference to collect the 7.5 billion euros, which the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said were lacking in order to achieve an appropriate response to the pandemic. They were not doing this entirely on their own initiative, though. The German government rather explains, that they are, with this effort, participating in the historic “Global Response” initiative to combat the corona virus. The press release says:
“On 24 April 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other global health actors launched the historic “Global Response” initiative to combat the coronavirus.
On 24 April, the Gates Foundation launched an initiative and less than two weeks later the EU and governments are holding a donor conference to contribute 7.4 billion euros. This response time is extraordinarily short.
GPMB, which ordered the money, is an “independent” institution assessing preparedness for pandemics in individual countries and the global community. The institution wants to improve preparedness by advising policy makers. Only in 2018, GPMB was founded by the World Health Organization (WHO), which has the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as one of its largest funders, and the World Bank, which is cooperating closely with the Gates Foundation in various bodies including the Better Than Cash Alliance. Concomitantly, the President of the Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program, Chris Elias, is a member of the GPMB Board of Directors.
Taxpayers’ money, ordered indirectly by the Gates Foundation is to be distributed to various Gates-funded organizations to be passed on to big pharmaceutical companies that comply with the philosophy of Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. This philosophy states that the betterment of the world is most efficiently done by the private sector on capitalist principles and in a sustainable way, i.e. for profit.
In the press release the German government only writes very vaguely who will receive the more than half a billion euros of German taxpayers money, plus one billion from the EU and another six billion from other countries for subsidizing the development of vaccines and the production of drugs and immunity tests:
Much of the money raised will be given to the World Health Organization (WHO), the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and the Coalition for Epidemic Prevention Innovation (CEPI) to invigorate their capabilities.
GAVI provides immunisation in developing countries. Main financiers are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the WHO.
CEPI is an offspring of the 2017 Davos meeting ot the World Economic Forum, the club of the largest multinational corporations.
The “Coalition for Emergency Preparedness Innovations” is intended to accelerate generating vaccines to prevent epidemics and to ensure a fair distribution of vaccines. In addition to the Gates Foundation, founding members are the WHO, significantly financed by Gates, and the EU Commission, delegating one member to the Board of Directors. Also Germany is co-financing.
Apart from CEPI, Unitaid and the Global Fund are reported as recipients in various media.
Unitaid is a WHO-based fund, co-funded by the Gates Foundation, purchasing large quantities of drugs at discount prices for people in poor countries, forwarding those drugs to partner organisations that ensure that they are only used in the target countries and do not ruin prices in the industrialised countries. Implementation partners include the Gates Foundation, GAVI and the Clinton Foundation. The bottom line is that Unitaid supports pharmaceutical companies’ profit maximizing strategy of monopolistic price discrimination according to customers’ ability to pay.
Under the aegis of WHO, The Global Fund was established by money from the Gates Foundation. Nowadays, it is mainly financed by governments and provides money to poor countries enabling them to buy drugs. A representative of the Gates Foundation is a board member of the Geneva-based organization that was haunted by various mismanagement and fraud scandals.
Criticism from non-commercial charitables
Cornelia Füllkrug-Weitzel, president of the relief organizations Brot für die Welt and Diakonie Katastrophenhilfe, sharply criticized on SWR radio that public money was flowing without accountability. She called this “highly unusual”, which is an understatement for scandalous.
However, in the most important daily news program ARD Tagesschau, we didn’t hear anything at all about this ctriticism oor even about who was going to receive the money that was collected. his might have been too complicated or too embarrassing because of the fact that ARD had recently devoted half of the Tagesthemen its news magazine (15 minutes) for an interview with the great benefactor Bill Gates.
Hiding all the exciting stuff
What do all these Gates-funded and co-run institutions do? Among other things, they write reports that are most interesting by what they leave out.
An example is the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s 2019 annual report. In the first place, thanks are given to leading organizations having prepared background papers, such as the John Hopkins University Center for Health Security, the World Bank and the WHO. The Gates Foundation and Germany are thanked for funding.
These happen to be the organization organizing or taking part in the Corona Pandemic Exercise Simulation Event 201 in October 2019.
Anyone having heard of the Pandemic Preparedness Index, the Johns Hopkins Center had compiled in together with the Nuclear Threat Initiative and with a large Grant from the Gates Foundation, will be quite a bit surprised that GPMB’s annual report on preparedness does not drop one word on the $2.25 million study on global pandemic preparedness or on the Nuclear Threat initiative.
But a background paper from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, commissioned by the GPMB, is mentioned in the references of the report and isavailable online. It is called “Preparedness for a High-Impact Respiratory Pathogen Pandemic” and was published in September 2019, one month before Johns Hopkins published the Pandemic Preparedness Index together with the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Surprise: the Nuclear Threat Initiative is mentioned in this paper only twice; once in the acknowledgements to people who were available for expert discussions and once it is mentioned that the Nuclear Threat Initiative together with the (Gates funded) Center for Global Development held a simulation exercise at the Munich Security Conference 2019, where the reactions to a deliberately released virus were simulated. The joint study on pandemic preparedness is also being suppressed in this Johns Hopkins paper, even though it has a whole chapter on other relevant assessment of pandemic preparedness.
This is a deception. and is certainly not the client GPMB, who commissioned the John Hopkins background paper, who is supposed to be deceived. Because that’s where Gates sits, who finances all those involved and their studies anyway. Thus, it has to be the public and possibly governments outside the US who are to be deceived.
The reasons could be that the Johns Hopkins Center’s background paper on health security is very much about deliberately released viruses, and that the Nuclear Threat Initiative is an organization that is obviously interested in health only when it comes to biological warfare. The Johns Hopkins Center, Bill Gates, Event 201, and the other institutions and activities of pandemic preparedness may not have been too keen to be associated with biological warfare, so the Nuclear Threat Institute was left out. This is, of course, just one of several possible speculations.
Translated with support from DeepL.com. My thanks go to both. German blogpost was published May 5.