The U.S. has committed $667 million to the World Bank’s Pandemic Fund, a “multilateral financing mechanism dedicated to strengthening pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response.”
Including the U.S. commitment, the fund raised nearly $1 billion in its latest pledge campaign — half of its $2 billion target — amid warnings of a greater-than-50% chance of a new pandemic in the next 25 years.
The Pandemic Fund was established in 2022 by the member states of the G20. Its largest private contributor — at $15 million — is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which also holds seats on the fund’s governing board.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a global public-private partnership that promotes vaccines — and is heavily funded by the Gates Foundation — also holds a seat on the Pandemic Fund’s board.
In an op-ed published last week in Fortune, Drs. Chatib Basri and Sabin Nsanzimana, co-chairs of the Pandemic Fund Board, said the “rapid spread of mpox and bird flu, and the recent Marburg virus outbreak, underscore the immediate need for new and sustained investments in pandemic preparedness to bolster our collective defenses.”
Fear of mpox and bird flu helped the fund reach commitments totaling $982 million at last week’s G20 Finance and Health Ministers’ joint meeting in Brazil. The fund also secured “co-financing from international organizations” totaling $1.8 billion.
The U.S. contribution of $667 million, first announced in July, “builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s steadfast commitment to strengthening global health security and pandemic preparedness around the world,” according to a U.S. Department of the Treasury press release. The funding is subject to congressional appropriations and the availability of funds.
The Pandemic Fund also secured commitments from Australia, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Singapore and Spain.
“The large sum of money given to the Pandemic Fund, coupled with calls for urgency, reveal the biopharmaceutical complex’s wishes for another global pandemic and further genetic injection deployments,” epidemiologist Dr. Nicolas Hulscher told The Defender.
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, said the involvement of private organizations like the Gates Foundation is incompatible with efforts to protect public health. Bell called it “a rush at present to grab … public money, diverted by governments to the area of pandemics.”
He added:
“If public health institutions are primarily to serve the people, then private and for-profit interests could not have a role in directing them. This was obvious to anyone a few decades ago, but somehow has become forgotten as public health salaries are increasingly dependent on such entities.”
Hulscher said the involvement of private entities like the Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), “suggests that the Pandemic Fund will not serve our best interests.”
Instead, the fund will “prioritize novel ‘vaccine’ development — including but not limited to self-amplifying mRNA injections, as evidenced by the 33 candidates in development,” Hulscher said.
In 2021, CEPI — one of the “implementing entities” of the Pandemic Fund along with Gavi — announced its “100 Days Mission” to build the capability to develop a vaccine for a future pandemic within 100 days.
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, has also “signaled its support and intention to partner with the Pandemic Fund, including through future financial contributions.”
“The burden of pandemics and outbreaks is grossly overstated, and the financing of the Pandemic Fund is grossly disproportionate to this,” Bell said. “The Fund is set up to manage an area of public health that will drive considerable profits for the pharmaceutical sector and its investors.”
“International public health is now predominantly driven by private and corporate interests, rather than concern for population health,” Bell added.
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An effort to ‘cement global control’
Claiming another pandemic “could strike at any moment,” the Pandemic Fund has granted $885 million for 47 pandemic preparedness projects in 75 countries — including $129 million in mpox-related initiatives.
Some of the projects the fund has given grants to employ a One Health approach. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines One Health as “an integrated, unifying approach to balance and optimize the health of people, animals and the environment.”
Bell said that while “One Health, as a holistic view of health, is fine,” the concept “has been hijacked by those with an authoritarian approach to public health, as a way to expand control over wider areas of public life.”
Hulscher said the One Health approach “seeks domain over our environment, plants, humans and animals. Thus, anything that employs this approach should be viewed with deep concern.”
Noting that most of the Pandemic Fund’s projects are in developing countries, Hulscher said, “Global Big Pharma believes it will face fewer obstacles testing experimental products in developing countries compared to developed countries like the U.S., where a large portion of the population now rejects unsafe injections.”
“There is considerable gain to be made from expanding surveillance in low-income countries, using natural changes in viruses to promote fear and justify responses that serve the interests of private sector actors, as we saw in COVID-19 and are seeing with the mpox response,” Bell said.
According to the Pandemic Fund’s Strategic Plan for 2024-2029, the fund will do more than fund projects in developing countries — it proposes to expand the global digital health infrastructure.
The plan calls for the development of “digital infrastructure within public institutions” to conduct “simulation exercises and real-time outbreak data collection and analysis” and the development of “digital infrastructure for data management and sharing between community, health facility, sub-national, national, regional, and global levels.”
Hulscher said such “digital infrastructure” likely includes the development of digital vaccine passports.
“Global vaccine passports are one of their primary goals for the ‘next pandemic’, aiming to forcibly boost vaccine uptake and cement global control,” Hulscher said.
The One Health approach also figures prominently in the strategic plan.
“The acceleration of global trends that increase the risk of pandemics … further underscores the urgent need to strengthen global health security through a One Health approach, taking into account the interconnection between people, animals, and the environment,” the plan states.
“The Pandemic Fund is not about global health,” said independent journalist James Roguski. “It is about global security. It’s a war on the health of people in foreign lands that is masquerading as pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”
Roguski added:
“Look at what the money is being allocated for. That money does not go to provide care to people. It is allocated as seed money to invest in infrastructure to facilitate the global expansion of the pharmaceutical-hospital-emergency-industrial complex.”
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Billions of dollars flowing to ‘pandemic industry’
According to Roguski, the Biden administration first laid the groundwork for the Pandemic Fund in September 2021, when Vice President Kamala Harris announced $250 million in seed funding for a new global health security fund at the World Bank.
Since then, the U.S. has allocated billions of dollars to the fund’s establishment.
“The $5 billion that was allocated by the National Defense Authorization Act of December 2022 goes to the Defense Department-funded, World Bank-operated Pandemic Fund,” Roguski said.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, said these outlays have little to do with protecting public health. He said:
“The promoters of these exorbitant funds pitch this as investment. It is not. It is straight-up spending. Every dime spent on these programs reinforces that dangerous agenda. This entire thing should be rejected, not only in the U.S. and Europe, but especially by poorer countries.
“The real health threat we face is from chronic disease, not infectious pathogens. It makes no sense to be spending tens of billions on this pandemic industry.”
Having raised nearly $1 billion, the backers of the Pandemic Fund are calling for more contributions, arguing that “the Pandemic Fund will exhaust most of its funds by next June.” The Pandemic Action Network has made a similar plea, calling on “all countries” to get “on board and [start] contributing to The Pandemic Fund.”
