– a dry run for Covid19?
Today’s post doesn’t just raise question marks over the wisdom of Bill Gates’ all-pervading power in Developing World health issues. It is also an object lesson in how hard it is in 2020 to unravel a filament of Truth from the web of spin and counter-spin in the contemporary media mélée.
A supposed “report” doing the internet rounds at the moment makes some pretty horrendous accusations against Billion Gates. It pitched up at Reddit over the weekend. It claimed that:
It’s certainly true that Indian doctors and politicians are justifiably wary of Gigarich Gates, but the charge that he paralysed half a million kids over seventeen years simply doesn’t check out.
On the other hand, the fact-check site Politifact scores the report “pants on fire” and gives Vaccination Gates a squeaky-clean bill of health. Politifact was founded by media proprietor Paul Tash, and its checks overwhelmingly favour Establishment narratives. Mr Tash is also a card-carrying member of Trumphate.
The company ‘Path’ backed by the Gates Foundation in India is also glossed over by Politifact as a ‘non-profit’, conveniently failing to mention that it has a track-record of profit-sniffing for Big Pharma in the Third World. In fact, a Financial Times report nails this in its piece of 18th November 2013 [my emphases]:
‘In 2009, Path, a US-based health charity, launched a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to study the cost and feasibility of incorporating HPV vaccines produced by Merck and GlaxoSmithKline, into India’s public sector immunisation programme….serious questions were raised over whether the participants’ parents – many of whom were illiterate – had given informed consent, and whether the project adequately tracked any adverse reactions…..an Indian parliamentary committee set up to probe the issue concluded the Path project was a clinical trial in all but name and that the organisation had used “subterfuge” to avoid the “arduous and strictly regulated process” of such a trial’
Hold that final thought: it is a modus operandum that the Billygoat clearly favours.
In 2016, the Developing World charity Global Justice Now produced a long and fascinating report. GJN isn’t an outfit I’d be comfortable in myself, but it clearly isn’t a a rebranded propagandist Lefty front either. Its chair is Nicola Ansell, the Professor of Human Geography at Brunel University, and she has a distinguished record of publishing over 80 reports and books on the nature of exploitation in the developing world.
The Report concluded [my emphases]:
‘The Gates Foundation and other influencers are dangerously skewing aid priorities….emphasis on single diseases is being given at the neglect of basic health care systems during the Ebola outbreak* in West Africa, basic healthcare collapsed completely in parts of the region.
‘The close working relations between the Foundation and others close to major international pharmaceutical corporations is linked to over-pricing of life-saving vaccine ** [and] its influence is skewing health priorities towards the interests of wealthy donors (vaccines) rather than resilient health systems.’
NOTES: *Our old friend the HCQ fiddler Peter Horby was involved in that little caper
** A separate report by the WHO reached an identical conclusion
An emerging pattern
Regular students of Contrick19 will recognise several of the elements that appear to have been carried forward into the Coronavirus snowjob of hype:
- Big Pharma hiding behind charities
- Bankrolling at all points by the Gates Foundation
- Rushing to market without thorough checks
- Using sales drives as drug trials
- Marketing focus on one vaccine at the expense of other ongoing health issues
- Collapse of the existing public health infrastructure.
There are myriad motives behind the outrageous exaggeration of the ‘threat’ to our species from Covid 19. But two have been obvious from the outset: first, the corruption of “objective” research and full-speed-ahead tactics of the SS Tipharmatanic as it speeds through the iceberg field; and second, the 3% neoliberal desire to eventually throttle the public health sector and replace it.
Bill Gates has form in all these areas. But the insight here, I think, is that point at which one can discern a “join” between two elements with entirely consonant motives: the neocon banking and stock market defence of its megawealth, and the Pharma desire to become a major élite player alongside the media and the Shadow State.
Control the money. Control the access to good health. Control the opinions of those you would hoodwink and exploit. Get rid of powerful elected influencers. Job done.
Two previous Slogposts apply here:
How Pharma has the NHS by the throat
Covid19 – How the damage was done
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