In a recent article in the Daily Sceptic, Robert Kogon makes in an important challenge to sceptics. Drawing on heated and futile exchanges on X, Kogon argues that there is little evidence that the WHO is ‘owned’ by private interests, and that many of the critics of the WHO’s agenda simply argue using memes rather than evidence. The truth of the WHO’s ownership is complicated, but Kogon’s observation that all that is sceptical is not reason is well made, and sceptics should challenge their own and each other’s thinking more if scepticism is to be more than cynicism and properly challenge the dull and dark orthodoxies that dominate today’s political establishment.
According to Kogon, analysis of the WHO’s funding sources shows that Gates cannot reasonably be said to own the WHO. Though the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is one of the WHO’s largest donors, second only to Germany, there are other donors, who, if the WHO were a company, would have between them a vastly greater controlling stake for their would-be ‘investment’. This is important arithmetic, which helps reveal the structure of the otherwise remote and opaque organisation that has had so much influence over our lives in recent years. It should not be dismissed.
And such arithmetic ought to lead to a more sophisticated and deeper understanding of how intergovernmental agencies and vast philanthropic enterprises have come to set the global political agenda. But unfortunately, many of our ideological allies reject this nuance because it challenges the very linear and monochromatic stories that have been used to explain the pandemic and lockdowns and more. There may well be truth in those stories. But broad brush strokes render them clumsily and unfaithfully, especially where detail is required.
Like Kogon’s targets, I have also argued that Gates has undue influence in the world, achieved by his championing of a new model of philanthropy. Coincident with the unprecedented wealth developed by tech billionaires and hyper-accumulations of capital, the role of intergovernmental agencies, such as the WHO and, of course, NGOs and strange ‘civil society’ organisations, from the WEF to obscure green outfits, have also expanded. The problem, now widely observed, is that nominally democratic governments today seem to be entirely subservient to this new power network. In my Climate Debate U.K. and the Together Association report on air pollution politics, I point out that the BMGF has donated nearly $5 billion to the WHO since 1999, most of which has been given in the last decade.
There are therefore similarities between my argument and the claims about the ‘ownership’ of the WHO, which may seem to contradict Kogon’s. Scientists can be found objecting to Gates’s influence explicitly, arguing that funding relationships of all kinds are distorting the scientific research agenda in favour of grantors’ preferences. This is leading to the possible loss of important research pathways, which can have “implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health”, they argue. Furthermore, a former WHO Director was quite open about the fact that her search for funding required an offer of a quid pro quo. Former WHO Director-General Margaret Chan somewhat let the cat out of the bag, admitting that:
Only 30% of my budget is predictable funds. [For the] other 70% I have to take a hat and go around the world to beg for money. And when they give us the money, they are highly linked to their preferences – what they like.
This new style of ‘philanthropy’ is not ‘no-strings’ charitable giving. It is strategic. And incredibly far-reaching. Gates’ and other philanthropists’ funding supports ‘news’ media organisations, universities and ‘civil society’ agendas that both influence the WHO and are influenced by it. As I argue in the report and elsewhere, a case can be made that philanthropists have bought out ‘civil society’ nearly in its entirety, pushing the public out of politics, and dominate research agendas on which policymakers and intergovernmental agencies rely. BMGF’s grants to the U.K. total over $3.5 billion, including $2 billion to universities.
But Robert Kogon is right to say that the numbers do not make the case by themselves. There is a difference between ownership and influence. Five billion dollars in grants to a global agency will of course cause an army of sycophants to scuttle around after you. The $82 billion that BMGF has granted over the years has brought a great deal of organisations into closer ideological alignment. It has generated immeasurable amounts of favourable news copy at the expense of critical journalism. But the claim that it has made Gates king of the castle is much harder to sustain.
Receipts evidencing illegitimate relationships between the mega-wealthy and intergovernmental agencies and civil society organisations and universities are not always easy to come by. Many protect themselves through various pass-through intermediaries and cloak the nature of their projects in obtuse slogans and buzzwords. But rather than assuming that the evidence of a total central command is simply hidden, it may make more sense to understand the structure of power in the 21st Century as precisely nebulous. There is a reason it is called ‘the Blob’, after all. And though the Blob itself may well be greedy for cash, it cannot be bought in its entirety.
This is a problem for people whose thinking exhibits 19th Century and early models of power, such as feudalism or Communist tyranny. But even such regimes had within them factions and sects that as often as not led to a downfall or revolution. And even tyrants’ survival ultimately depended on popular will, even if it had to be coerced through terror.
Moreover, ownership is in itself a somewhat outmoded concept. For example, a number of philanthropic foundations which make grants to organisations supporting the routine array of woke causes are not in themselves necessarily owned by a single interest. They may be attached to massive hedge funds or financial institutions, such as the $10 trillion monster, BlackRock, which manages the wealth of countless individuals. In much the same way, giant corporations have very many shareholders. They can be coerced and outvoted. But not even Gates can outbid them.
This is not an age of kings and princes, nor of revolutions and revolutionaries. Not in the West, at least. Power is constituted entirely differently, not in an absolute monarch, nor in a ‘people’ represented by a dictator, nor even in democracy – as we have seen. Yet reactions to observations such as Kogon’s hark back to such eras, if not sheer fantasy. The idea of power without an executive is confusing. Everything must therefore be explained by UN Agenda 21, or the WEF, or merely Gates. But an alternative hypothesis might be that green, woke and other authoritarian ideologies take on a power of their own, for precisely the reason of there not being an executive, sweeping even billionaires, corporations and hyper-accumulations of capital into the chaos – nobody is in control.
Don’t misunderstand me. The point here is not that the likes of Gates have no power. One of the problems besetting genuinely independent researchers is that, whereas we can find even nominally Right-of-centre, ‘libertarian’ think tanks routinely being funded to produce support for pro-green policies to the tune of £50,000-plus per report by the likes of Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg or Christoher Hohn-controlled grant-making bodies, independent researchers have practically zero resources and work for effectively zero or close to it. I am only too aware of the power of money and the problem of not having it. But even money is constrained by ideology just as much as the rest of us.
Kogon is right. Sceptics of power and trendy ideological causes do need to be more thorough and more discriminating. This should mean being sceptical about the idea of masterplans. It is right to say that a new form of politics is developing, and there are particular ideological aspects to this development and its expression. But we must be careful about creating a counsel of despair, or sense of fait accompli in response. Many of the players are just chancers, winging it to service their vanity and portfolios and the ideologies they attach themselves to are merely instruments. We see alignment where there may just be fickle marriages of convenience. And there are, within the blobs, significant tensions. Blobs within blobs.
And we need to do better than merely trade memes. Research is hard work, takes years and often leads to dead ends rather than rabbit holes. We should be cautious about claims of historical continuity. It is right to mock greens as Stalinist authoritarians. But it is wrong to say that green ideologues are the direct successors to Marxism and Communist dictators. Too many princes and too many billionaires are now best mates with Greta to sustain that notion. If we want to focus our limited resources and persuade others, we need to be accurate about how the current situation developed and make such arguments cautiously, without the grand, sweeping narrative arches that cannot be sustained by the facts at our disposal. In other words, we should be sceptical of our own scepticism, not to negate it, but to improve it, and allow it to improve.
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