by Dr David Livermore, Daily Sceptic:
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.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
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.
To Elon Musk and the DOGE team looking at Medicare: