Let me begin with a declaration of interest. I’m cross with Microsoft, Bill Gates’s cash-cow. Here’s why. I need Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Teams, so I subscribe to Microsoft’s Family 365. I’d rather buy outright, but that’s no longer practicable for computer programmes, so I rent. It costs me £80 annually, and all went well for years. Then, suddenly, I found it infected with an “AI assistant” called “Copilot”. Like a wasp at a September picnic, this buzzed around, determined to involve itself in whatever I was doing. I tried to kill it but managed only to wound. It lingers on the ribbon atop the screen. Then I read Sam Leith’s UnHerd article warning that my Microsoft subscription rate would rise by £25 to cover this unwanted pestilence. Exactly as Leith wrote, I found I had to faff about to “downgrade” to Classic 365, which omits Copilot and remains at £80 annually “for a limited period”. Until I am coerced into acquiescence, I suspect.
I include this preamble to illustrate the shysters we face. You’ll see the connection later. By what right can Bill Gates’s cash-cow ‘upgrade’ my account without asking? No doubt there is a clause in the small print. Can they install a wasps’ nest in my loft?
And so to Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO. Whether he legally can do this by executive order remains to be seen. There are legal challenges. Because the US joined the WHO by Act of Congress, an Act may be needed to leave. If so, good luck.
The WHO did good in the past. It led the vaccination campaigns against smallpox, now eradicated, and polio, nearly eradicated. For many years it honourably focused on local community-led initiatives to improve health, often by improving sanitation. Unfortunately, even by 1998, the BBC noted that it was a “by-word for politicking and financial mismanagement”. Latterly it has interested itself in the preoccupations of the progressive Left, as with a guideline on the “Health of trans- and gender-diverse people”.
It failed during the Covid pandemic. It could not bring itself to say that it was first warned by Taiwan, a country excluded under Chinese pressure. Like the UK, it next abandoned its reasonable ‘Keep calm and carry on’ plan, advocating the very lockdowns, social distancing, border closures and universal masking that it had previously eschewed. Its investigation into the virus’s origins was infamous. Panel members had to be agreed with China. Among those from the USA, only Peter Daszak – with huge conflicts of interest – was approved. Unsurprisingly, it concluded that the virus likely came from wildlife, or possibly frozen food. A lab leak was “extremely unlikely”. This dismissal was odd given that the pandemic began in a city far from the bat caves, but which hosted an institute manipulating coronavirus genomes. The report was so ridiculously one-sided as to re-invigorate the lab-leak hypothesis.
The WHO is unabashed by these experiences. Instead, it is doubling down. It has declared monkeypox (Mpox) to be a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern’. This is obvious exaggeration. Most cases outside Africa, where the virus is endemic, are among those attending gay sex parties. There is a good argument for offering smallpox vaccines, which cross-protect, to habitues. For everyone else there’s scant risk. It’s not an emergency, even with a lower case ‘e’. Then there is the WHO’s International Health Treaty which, if ratified, would confer supra-national powers in a future pandemic. That is like giving Power of Attorney to a spendthrift megalomaniac uncle.
Many positive articles about Trump’s withdrawal stress these failings. They add that Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director, is an Ethiopian non-medic with a shady past who owes his position to support from China’s CCP. The WHO is said to be China’s poodle. Gordon Brown, writing in the Guardian to regret Trump’s decision doesn’t offer much of a defence, just saying that a global health organisation is needed, whilst conceding that the USA is paying too much.
But is China the incubus? I’m sure the CCP has done much to obfuscate on Covid; I loathe the CCP; but I find that it hard to believe that it is behind the WHO’s excitement apropos trans health and Mpox. So, let’s look at an alternative hypothesis, one that RFK favours, according to his book: that the WHO has been converted into a money machine for Gates.
To understand, look first at where the WHO’s money comes from. For the two years of 2024-25 the biggest contributors to a budget of $6.83 billion are: the USA ($958 million), Gates Foundation ($689 million), GAVI ($500 million), European Commission ($412 million) and Germany ($324 million). The UK is in seventh place at $216 million and China eighth at $203 million. GAVI is the Global Alliance for Vaccination and Immunisation. Its own funding, for 2021-25 inclusive, was $21.6 billion, including $4.98 billion from the USA, $2.64 billion from the UK, $2.18 billion from Germany and $1.81 billion from Gates.
Note that GAVI has pockets as deep as the WHO, that Gates accounts for 8-10% of each one’s income and that GAVI cross-funds the WHO. Together Gates and GAVI provide 18% of the WHO’s budget. GAVI’s role is to buy vaccines and to distribute them. It usually sets its own priorities, which we’ll examine some other day. The present issue comes when the WHO declares a pandemic. GAVI then moves to funding the relevant vaccines. During Covid it co-led, with the WHO and CEPI, the COVAX effort. This delivered shots – principally AstraZeneca’s – to developing countries.
CEPI, in turn, is the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation. For 2022-26 it has contributions and pledges worth $2.1 billion, mostly from governments, but including $155 million from Gates. It’s more blue sky than the WHO and GAVI and has a ‘moonshot’ objective of allowing progression from ‘pandemic recognised’ to a vaccine in 100 days. You’ll only achieve that with mRNA technology, arming lipid nanoparticles with a new payload and pretending that prior experience, with different payloads, establishes safety. This is nonsense, of course. Luo’s recent work confirms that mRNA vaccines go all over the body, and that the response of cardiac endothelial cells in particular varied with the mRNA payload and its protein product. More simply, it’s impossible to garner long-term safety and efficacy data in a 100-day development cycle.
Now to the Gates Foundation itself. Besides co-supporting WHO, GAVI and CEPI, Gates invests in pharma start-ups, including BioNTech. Moderna is a previous investee. It also trades these holdings, making a 15-fold profit on sales of BioNTech stock during the pandemic. Microsoft itself had a good pandemic, increasing Gates’s wealth by $7.5 billion.
It is possible to draw a circle of virtue. First, the WHO recognises a threat. Next, aided by CEPI, Gates’s investee companies swiftly develop a vaccine. GAVI delivers this, even to the poorest villager. Humanity is saved. The proceeds flow to the BMGF foundation and fund better health for all – the WHO’s raison d’etre. The sun is shining, the wind soft and who could object, except a churl? Bill asserted that, pre- pandemic, he’d invested $10 billion in global health organisations, bringing public health and economic benefits worth $200 billion. I’ve friends in healthcare who’d concur, though some seek grants and may be biased.
A darker view can also be taken. The WHO can be nudged into over-reaction, as with calling Mpox as an ‘Emergency’. The Pandemic Treaty, if ratified, will hugely strengthen its powers. Any consequent lockdowns would be brief, we’d be told, for CEPI will shortly be along with its 100-day vaccine. Once this is delivered, money will flow from taxpayers, via GAVI, to the manufacturer, likely a Gates investee.
Gates, GAVI and CEPI will benefit from the WHO declaring epidemics and pandemics, and Gates, paying around 10% of the NGOs’ budgets, has leverage. One of RFK’s charges is that, even outside pandemics, Gates has pushed the WHO disproportionately towards vaccines compared with basic public heath interventions such as clean water.
Big Tech, too, will benefit whenever a pandemic is declared, as in the Covid lockdowns. The Microsoft cash cow will grow fatter still. Western legacy media, bribed with Gates’s money for ‘Global Health Security Supplements‘ will look the other way, exclusively berating Tedros and the CCP. In short, a perfect rentier model for extracting money from the taxpayer has been created under the guise of philanthropy, with scrutiny deflected. Microsoft’s attempt to scam me for £25 for Copilot is trivial by comparison, but it illustrates the mindset.
There is one ray of hope, besides Trump’s withdrawal. And that is RFK, who recognises this nexus of NGO grift. His Senate approval interviews are slated for this Wednesday. For this, and many other reasons, it is to be hoped he is approved and appointed.
Dr David Livermore is a retired Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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Great idea, and good luck. But what about the incessant propaganda from the lying BBC?
The BBC bangs the Davos – Gates drum – the only answer is total avoidance of BBC news.
So they are openly manipulating people and proud of it.
Thus tyranny is normalised by a shameless, cynical and perverse media; and the cretins still consuming it.
Some psychologists have done their ‘profession’ a great disservice these last 18 months.
I always knew psychology was bull. Now it turns out it is evil too.
Psychologists were always heavily involved in ‘eugenics’ theory and models.
Gates provides funds to all Global Media Corporations and MSM publications . There is no pluralism in the MSM – it is now just a droning propaganda monotone.
That’s right, tyranny didn’t end with the Nuremberg trials or the fall of the Berlin Wall. History, far from ending, continues apace.
But the media are not the source. That’s the Cabinet office and that’s far more serious for democracy.
“If you’ve recently read a newspaper, popular magazine, science journal or watched a major television news outlet, you have probably seen news item after news item regarding the Climate Crisis or the Climate Emergency.”
It all comes from an organisation called Covering Climate Now.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/05/04/the-climate-propaganda-cabal/?fbclid=IwAR1I9gLY-MdHSquFEHbRFzOuOWCSGMGfk_oHU234Z78cEFSRcasEe4GA5ws
Its a pity the people putting out the Climate Crisis or the Climate Emergency propaganda don’t look up in the sky every now and again. Below is a photo of sometimes daily occurrence above my house in France, and having a relative who’s a highly trained jet engine technician I know for sure that’s not condensation trails up there.. Absolutely disgusting..
Mmmn.. a down tick for what exactly. I must have scored a hit with my photo. Taken by a real person at a known place, and backed up with technical expertise
Luckily very few people watch Sky News.
Surely you can do this for every MSM source over the last two years? Every blatant lie, coercive article, obvious nudge, manipulative advert and all the one eyed ‘reporting’?
Come on Toby let’s report everyone. Perhaps you could organise a campaign here? Flood OFCOM, advertising standards and the press complaints commission with demands they investigate?
No, Sky (no worse, certainly than BBC etc.) has stupidly trumpeted their behaviour which, as Laura and Toby point out, is completely at odds with what the regulator is supposed to be enforcing.
They have been daft and arrogant enough to put their cocks on the block. Now we need someone to enthusiastically wield the chopper.
About time people started calling out the media. They are an absolute disgrace and know exactly what they are doing. Toby Young understands how the industry works as do the Free Speech Union which is full of media veterans. Brainwashing the masses. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/headlines-change-way-think
Try GBNews – they are trying!
However criticism of the vaccine narrative is censored by Ofcom under the “Emergency Powers” the MPs and Johnson are so keen to maintain ‘forever.’
Like ALL those happy multiculti families which are protraed on EVERY TV commercial? And those footballers whogenuflect to tblack criminals before each game?
I give up.
Laura, Toby, brilliant work!
But good luck in getting a sensible response from Ofcom, who are up to their necks in the same putrid scam.
When, after a great delay, they tell you to “Shut Up and Save the Planet”, as they certainly will, we need to consider what further steps are available. They are likely to need crowd funding.
I guess that, unfortunately, even those increasingly aware of our Beloved Leaders’ similar wilful distortion of facts, Policy Based Evidence Making, Project Fear and their blatant recruitment of the most incompetent and venal whores in media and academia, all in the service of Zero Covid (and their nice “Christmas Cards” from Big Pharma), haven’t realised the implications of this Net Zero nonsense, which will finally destroy the West.
Well done, thank you for fighting.
Cancelling my Sky subscription 4 years ago was supremely liberating.
Do it now folks, hit them where it hurts.
Buy yourself a Freesat box, where you have access to many channels and can record hundreds of hours of programmes.
I’ve been running one from the early days of HD broadcasting – a Humax product made in 2008; still working. Loads of junk channels, but at least they’re free to browse around.
Have you heard the term ‘Propaganda‘ before? The focus should be the censorship coming with the online harms bill.
Very dangerous legislation that they are deliberately keeping out of the news. Another step towards their slow tyranny by stealth project while the sheep stay asleep.
Well it’s having the negative effect on me. I’ve had two big bonfires this month and even went for a drive just for fun in my 25mpg car and because they keep going on about it all the time I have also stopped recycling too.
Almost guarantee you’ll get 40mpg out of it if you try hard enough. Though admittedly economy runs are rather tedious…
IMO possibly the most egregious aspect of this thing in the UK has been the way in which the government has used our money to manufacture consent and terrorise us. I think governments should simply be constitutionally prohibited from having any kind of “Nudge unit”.
I’ve been telling my better half this is what goes on in British broadcasting for years and not just Net Zero either; the whole Woke agenda is foisted upon the unsuspecting public too both in programming and especially advertising. This is precisely why I no longer watch U.K. tv. All of it is blatant propaganda; sickens me our once great country has turned into this cesspit.
There is a complete lack of knowledge about how the media (propaganda) industry works. Very disappointed that Daily Sceptic hasn’t done an article explaining the importance of Headlines and their psychological impact. The UK corporate media are engaged in a 24/7 war to demonise and isolate the ‘unvaccinated’.
Over 80% of people won’t read beyond the headline and the rest who do read on will have their mindset influenced by it. Behavioural psychologists and propagandists understand all the tricks.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/headlines-change-way-think
yea but no but yea old news gov invested in media millions yea but no but yea
Well done – more of it!
SKY is owned by Globalist Corporate Comcon which bankroll disastrous Biden and the US democrats and back the whole disastrous Net Zero agenda.
As in brain-washing children? Or do they have a preferred euphemism for it?
Good stuff but I hope you checked it for typos…
I wish you the best of luck. The whole of the MSM needs investigation but you have to start somewhere.
As Ofcom guidance has been at the root of covid reporting it’s a bit like asking the police to police themselves but I fully support your efforts.
Great to see action at last on the covert activities of the Nudge Unit. There is no place for such a thing in a supposed Democracy. Not sure though why most comments(richly deserved) are directed solely at the media. They’re just the Monkeys. The Organ Grinders are the Cabinet Office. Every politician must be aware of this covert political activity. So what’s to be done about that?