President Donald Trump’s administration is set to end funding to GAVI, the global vaccine partnership co-founded by Bill Gates, as part of the cancellation of more than 5,300 USAID programmes. The Telegraph has more. (Trigger warning: the report is from the Telegraph‘s Gates-funded Global Health Security team!)
The United States is poised to stop funding Gavi, a major global vaccine partnership credited with saving the lives of millions of children.
President Donald Trump’s administration also plans to dramatically scale back its support for work to combat malaria, but will continue to fund some grants for drugs that treat HIV and tuberculosis, as well as provide food aid to countries hit by wars and natural disasters.
The decisions, first reported by the New York Times, were included in a spreadsheet sent to Congress on Monday night by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which listed the projects that will continue – and those that won’t – after the expiry of Trump’s 90-day freeze on foreign aid.
The 281-page document reveals what little will be left of USAID, the organisation that, since the 1960s, has led US efforts to alleviate poverty, disease and humanitarian crises.
In all, more than 5,300 programmes are to be axed as part of Trump’s plan to align overseas spending with his ‘America First’ approach. Among them is funding for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which monitors diseases like bird flu that have the potential to jump from animals to people.
Confirming the decisions, the US State Department, which now runs USAID, said: “Each award terminated was reviewed individually for alignment with agency and administration priorities, and terminations were executed where Secretary [Marco] Rubio determined the award was inconsistent with the national interest or agency policy priorities.”
Only 898 of USAID’s awards will continue, according to the documents. But it remains unclear whether the Trump’s administration will actually be able to unilaterally cancel everything it plans to – many of its attempts to cut funds already allocated by Congress are currently being challenged in court.
Though many in the global health sector could see it coming after Trump froze almost all US foreign aid on taking office, the decision to end support for Gavi, which is believed to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was established 25 years ago, has rattled many.
The US has historically been among Gavi’s biggest donors, contributing around 13% of its annual budget. The grant terminated by the Trump administration was worth $2.6 billion and was intended to last until 2030, the New York Times reported.
Read in full here.
GAVI is a central player in the global pandemic preparedness industry that orbits around the WHO and which has been a handy money machine for Gates in recent years. Here’s Professor David Livermore’s explanation of how it works:
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’être. 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.
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