"Preparing for the Next one"
An examination of public-private partnerships, billionaire philanthropy, and global health.
Global health functions a little bit like a mafia (an analogy I have to thank the Amazing Polly for). This might sound outrageous, yes, but I assure you, it’s pretty damn true. And the more you learn about it, the more mind-blowing it becomes — especially once you start to notice the extent to which this activity seems to be happening right under our noses.
Case in point: the Pandemic Action Network (PAN), an organisation whose mission is to “bring an end to the Covid-19 crisis” and “ensure the world is prepared for the next pandemic” — because, you know, that one really could wipe us all out (as Bill Gates likes to remind us every couple of months).
The truth, however, is that organisations like the PAN are just the front-facing element of this extortionate enterprise. They represent the sanitised, well-polished face of what has become known as the global public private partnership (GPPP) — global capitalism’s favourite mechanism of governance.
I quite enjoy thinking of it as a restaurant. In a restaurant you have front of house staff (waiters, bartenders, managers, and all the people who interact with the customers), and back of house staff (cooks, chefs, kitchen supervisors, KPs, etc — the people behind the scenes whom the customers do not see). Although the analogy is not perfect, this is how GPPPs work: the front of house staff (organisations like the PAN) are responsible for selling customers (the public; you) whatever the back of house staff (PAN’s corporate partners and funders) cook up in their kitchen.
Okay, maybe it’s not at all like a restaurant. And yes, maybe I should be slightly less cynical, but just humour me for a second — imagine Klaus Schwab in a chef apron cooking up a Great Reset Risotto with a side of You’ll Own Nothing and be Happy and handing it to Greta Thunberg and Bono to serve to your normie friends and family. This is basically the dynamic here. Slightly caricatured, but you get the idea. We have front-facing and back-facing organisations. It’s a whole bloody ecosystem, let me tell you, and it is thriving.
So the PAN wants to (i) end Covid and (ii) prepare the world for the next pandemic. Great. But what does that mean? What does the pursuit of these objectives actually entail?
If you head over to their website, you will see a fairly long list of articles focussed on these two core issues:
This is the part that makes me slightly incandescent with rage, because it really only takes reading a few of these articles to understand how this depraved, consensus-manufacturing machine operates. You see, it turns out that what “ending Covid-19” and “preparing the world for the next pandemic” really mean is:
creating markets for new vaccines and therapeutics and bringing “vaccine equity” to the poorest nations
building mechanisms for the financing of medical countermeasures against new emerging diseases (basically lobbying governments for pandemic prevention funding); and
investing in R&D for technologies that will allow us to detect and track emerging diseases as rapidly as possible
So basically we just need to invest a lot of money in new technologies/ R&D for therapeutics and vaccines and build a lot more public-private-partnerships that will enable the smooth functioning of this entire, preventative operation, which would presumably be continuous. Like a perpetual war against a potential virus.
Sounds great, right? Just typing that makes me feel safer.
But this is where things get interesting, because it turns out that the PAN is just one of many organisations dedicated to ending/preventing/mitigating/preparing the world for the next pandemic. Remember what I said earlier about this being a whole, thriving ecosystem? Here are eight more organisations dedicated to the pursuit of a similar set of objectives:
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI)
The Global Institute for Disease Elimination (GLIDE)
It’s important to note that despite their similarities, these organisations occupy very different positions within the pandemic preparedness ecosystem.
The PAN, for example, mainly pursues its goals by informing policy, mobilising resources and public support, and “catalyzing action” in the short and long term. In other words, their role is to lobby governments for resources and raise awareness about pandemics and the importance of pandemic preparedness.
But they’re not going to be directly involved with vaccine financing like CEPI is; and CEPI is not going to be involved with the discovery and sequencing of novel zoonotic viral threats like the Global Virome Project is.
Think of it as the same overall mission being pursued through different strategies and avenues. It’s quite brilliant, actually — well done to the visionaries behind this.
But enough beating around the bush — as I said, this is where things become much more interesting. However, there is only so far we can go whilst focusing on the front of house operations. To really understand how this whole thing functions, we need to see what’s happening in the kitchen, at the back of the house…
Meet the Bill and the Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the most influential organisations in the world when it comes to funding (and investing in) global health. Remember earlier when I mentioned Bill Gates’ frequent warnings about pandemic preparedness and how we need to be ready for a pandemic far worse than Covid? Well, let’s just say it all starts making a lot more sense once you begin to appreciate the role of his charitable foundation in the context of everything we’ve been talking about.
So let’s go back to about twelve years ago, in 2010, when the “global health community” (but really, Bill Gates’ GAVI) declared that the next ten years would represent the “decade of vaccines”. Below you can see the goals that were set in the resulting Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP):
This is all wonderful, isn’t it? Well-meaning charitable organisations, individuals, and private companies working day and night to alleviate human suffering around the world through the miracles of science, modern medicine, and public-private partnerships. How lovely!
But…what about the kinds of incentives that something like this generates?
And by “this” I mean the pervasive idea that the solution to every problem — especially in the underdeveloped world — lies in vaccines, vaccines, and more vaccines, an approach for which Gates and his foundation have been criticised numerous times.
So yes, Bill Gates really, really likes vaccines. Especially new vaccines. That much is clear. The question is how exactly does this passion translate into the real world? We’ve just learned about the decade of vaccines, but what about all the other activities his foundation has been involved in when it comes to pandemic preparedness?
Below you can find my attempt to map this complex web of connections and partnerships. Mind you, it still needs quite a bit of work, so if you have any suggestions on how to improve it let me know in the comments.
Quite a picture, isn’t it? Let’s go through a couple of interesting connections.
For starters, the Gates Foundation is partnered with the PAN, which was co-founded by Gabrielle Fitzgerald, a former Gates Foundation employee who used to lead its Global Program Advocacy team. The PAN’s other co-founder, a woman by the name of Carolyn Reynolds, occupies a senior role at PATH, a global health non-profit which has also received billions of dollars in grant money from the Gates Foundation, and is also partnered with the PAN.
The Gates Foundation is also — in partnership with the governments of India and Norway, the Wellcome Trust, and the World Economic Forum — a founding member of CEPI, one of the eight organisations dedicated to pandemic preparedness we just looked at. The purpose of this GPPP — which happens to be a foundation — is to channel donations from the public/private sectors and from philanthropic/civil society organisations towards the financing of independent research projects to develop vaccines against emerging infectious diseases.
Just to highlight the adjacence of the Gates Foundation to the Covid pandemic response, CEPI was responsible, in conjunction with GAVI (another Gates-founded organisation) and the WHO (whose second largest funder is the Gates Foundation) for establishing COVAX, an initiative aimed at granting equitable access to Covid vaccines (pandemic preparedness’ goal number one, if you remember).
Are you starting to see a picture emerge? Let’s keep going. It gets better.
If you look to the top left side of the map, you will notice something called the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB). This is an “independent monitoring and accountability body to ensure preparedness for global health crises.” It’s also a joint arm of the WHO and the World Bank, but I won’t get into that now. What we’re interested in knowing is what this “independent” monitoring board thinks about global health emergencies and how to deal with them. To do that, we can look at their 2021 Annual Report — From Worlds Apart to a World Prepared — where they set out a series of recommendations aimed at strengthening the world in the face of pandemics:
More global governance, more public-private partnerships, more “stakeholder engagement”, and of course, more resources towards pandemic preparedness.
Is this the GPMB or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation speaking? You tell me. But before you answer that, just be aware that on the GPMB board of directors sits a man by the name of Christopher Elias, who happens to be the president of the Global Development Program at the the Gates Foundation.
Other notable board members include Dr. Victor Dzau, president of the US National Academy of Medicine, a non-profit which has taken grant money from the Gates Foundation; and Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust — another incredibly large funder of global health.
So yeah, I’m sure we’re in safe hands with our friends at the GPMB.
The last thing I wanted to look at today — because it is getting slightly late and this article is already way longer than I thought it would be — is an interesting example of how this “pandemic preparedness consensus” propagates across institutions.
Earlier we looked at CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation. One of the things this organisation does is advocate for the production of new vaccines against novel pathogens in 100 days or less. Essentially, CEPI wants us to get to the point where we are able to produce, manufacture, and distribute a new vaccine within 100 days of the discovery of an outbreak. Another wonderful initiative.
Can you imagine? A novel pathogen is sequenced by the Global Virome Project in South East Asia, and boom, the production of a new mRNA vaccine that will be ready to go into your arm within 100 days is instantly triggered in some lab in Germany.
Regardless of how you feel about this, you should know that Tony Blair loves it. So much so, in fact, that his very own foundation — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — has directly advocated for precisely the same approach to dealing with infectious disease outbreaks!
That’s right — in its report titled “The New Necessary: How We Future-Proof for the Next Pandemic”, the think-tank makes a series of recommendations that would probably make Bill Gates himself blush:
So the Gates Foundation gives the Tony Blair Institute tens of millions of dollars in grant money, and in exchange, the Tony Blair Institute produces a 57-page report on pandemic preparedness and 100-day vaccines that may as well have been written by Gates himself.
I mean, surely there are laws against this sort of thing?
Below is another example of the Tony Blair Institute making sure it gets its check from the Gates Foundation at the end of the month:
On a more serious note, I think that what we are witnessing in the world of global health is an attempt to fully institutionalise the kind of pandemic preparedness favoured by the likes of the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
As far as I can see, this is what virtually all of this is about. Creating mechanisms. Setting policy. Manufacturing consensus. Making the public believe that there couldn’t possibly be another way to do this. Hell, making governments believe that there couldn’t possibly be another way to do this.
The other side of this is philosophical, because if you look closely you can see a very particular ethos permeating through the vision and mission of the would-be healers of our world. This idea that we can get rid of disease, illness, suffering; that everything needs to be fixed; that the human condition needs to be fixed. Of course, there will always be those who dismiss these kinds of concerns as “anti-science”, or as ungratefulness towards the miracles of modern medicine, but those are just lazy criticisms. Anyone who actually sits down to reflect on the implications of this sanitised, medicalised vision of humanity understands that there is at the very least a debate to be had.
And I know for a fact that when faced with the reality of the kind of world that someone like Bill Gates would like us to live in, the vast majority of people would feel repulsed.
Some would love it though.
This is incredible work.
I am fortunate I found your research and writing!