Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), recently took to Twitter to promote Gates’ new book, “How to Prevent the Next Pandemic.”
“I fully agree that we must act on COVID19’s lessons and innovate so that we can deliver swift, equitable health solutions to prevent the next pandemic,” Tedros tweeted, tagging the Gates Foundation and including a photo of himself holding the book.
The book is due to be released in May, but the software developer has been pushing his vision for a pandemic response since the COVID-19 outbreak began in late 2019.
“If every country does what Australia did, then you wouldn’t be calling [the next outbreak] a pandemic,” Gates said at a security conference in Munich, Germany. The southern nation only recently lifted its strict travel protocols that quarantined all arrivals in the country in either special facilities or in their homes, in the case of residents. The government also provided support for locked down businesses and built a testing network that could track the small number of cases that percolated through other safety measures.
As a result, Australia’s only significant outbreak was the most recent Omicron variant, and while one in five Australians has had COVID-19, only 6,787 people have died of the virus, or 1 in 3,737 people, according to New York Times data. The death rate in the US, where response measures were heavily politicised and unevenly implemented, is about 10 times higher, with 1 in every 330 people dying of COVID.
Gates, of course, isn't a doctor or health expert in any way, but he is a very rich man and a heavy investor in pharmaceutical and medical research companies. Some of those include COVID-19 vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, antiviral drug maker Merck, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which partnered with the WHO on its COVAX global vaccine distribution network. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is, in turn, the second-largest source of funding for the WHO after Germany, accounting for 10.7% of its annual budget, according to Quartz.
In fact, he fought against the proposal by some 80 of the world’s poorest nations for the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines, allowing Third World nations to produce them domestically without having to pay the enormous prices charged by Western corporations. The proposal was also opposed by the pharmaceutical giants, including those invested in by Gates. Advocates argued that by leaving poorer nations largely dependent on vaccine donations - most of which passed through or were bought by COVAX, facilitated by the WHO and the Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance - they were prolonging the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF), rarely an opponent of Western corporations, warned that allowing COVID-19 to persist in the developing world risked putting a halt to the global economic recovery, the worst and longest-lasting damage of which was also happening to those same poor nations.