FOLLOWING the review of foreign aid funding and the dismantling of USAID ordered by President Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio submitted plans to Congress to terminate $1.6billion in funding pledged by the Biden administration to GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
The proposed elimination of US government funding would amount to a 15 per cent cut in GAVI’s budget. The US is one of four donors who combined to contribute a whopping 70 per cent of GAVI’s 2020-2025 US$8.8billion budget raised at a UK government-hosted pledging conference in June 2020. The US government, which donated $1.58billion, is GAVI’s third-largest donor behind the UK government (£1.6billion) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) which donated $1.6billion for the last cycle. The Norwegian government was the fourth major donor, contributing a further $1billion. GAVI raised a separate $14.6billion in 2020 and 2021 for COVAX, the financing vehicle set up to create a market for COVID vaccines in the developing world. The US government committed $4billion of this, and the UK government £528million. The developing world was largely supplied with the dangerous and undertested Oxford AstraZeneca covid vaccine. The UK donated 30million doses which were surplus to requirements.
The Gates Foundation has already said neither it nor any other private foundation can replace the US government funding.
The US announcement is a major blow to the vaccine market shaper which aspired to raise US$9billion from donors at its June 2025 pledging conference to be hosted jointly by the European Union and the BMGF. The UK government will also reduce its donation from the £1.65billion pledged by the Johnson government in 2020 following last month’s announcement by Chancellor Rachel Reeves of cuts to the UK foreign aid budget.
And so the emotional blackmail has commenced.
The BBC, whose headline claimed a million children could die, said that GAVI’s chief executive Dr Sania Nishtar told them a funding cut would ‘be disastrous for global health security’.
The rhetoric is always about saving children’s lives, but the reality is that GAVI was set up in the interests of the pharmaceutical companies to enable them to expand the market for new or ‘under-utilised’ vaccines into the world’s poorest countries while simultaneously removing the commercial risks to the manufacturer.
Although the BMGF put up the initial seed funding for GAVI, the idea for it came not from Bill Gates but from Dr Seth Berkeley of the Rockefeller Foundation, who is now chief executive of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). With 70 per cent of the world’s population in the Global South, they saw a huge untapped market for vaccines, particularly if every country on the planet could be cajoled into adopting and fully complying with the US childhood vaccination schedule which recommends 30 doses of 15 different vaccines up to the age of 18.
Like a street corner crack dealer, GAVI’s aim is to entice countries into using these drugs then transition them into paying the full cost themselves. GAVI negotiates lower prices from manufacturers in return for creating a guaranteed market for expensive new vaccines such as HPV and pneumococcal vaccine, on which it is estimated it spent a combined total of $11billion on since 2010. Seventy countries including sub-Saharan African countries, Haiti and Afghanistan, are supported by GAVI which uses donor funding to subsidise and supply vaccines. The poorest countries pay virtually nothing. Exactly how much profit the manufacturers have made is unknown, but the profit margin is estimated to be between 20-30 per cent: far from trifling even with the lower cost per dose agreed.
The 32-member proto-board set up in March 1999 by the Rockefeller Foundation included Bill Gates, Dr Christopher Elias, the director of the population control organisation PATH, and Dr Gro Harlem-Brundtland, the WHO Director General. Brundtland, having co-chaired the 1987 World Commission on Environment and Development alongside the Rockefeller Foundation trustee Maurice Strong, helped create Agenda 21, more commonly known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
GAVI claims that vaccination helps to achieve 14 of the 17 SDGs, including helping to increase levels of educational attainment. It largely repeats evidence-free claims made by UNICEF in the 1980s when it was led by the former USAID official and Rockefeller Foundation trustee James P Grant who in 1984 successfully pressured the WHO into endorsing universal vaccination. Back then, it was accepted fact that malnourishment was the key underlying factor contributing to death from diseases such as measles. It’s a difficult problem to solve, requiring widespread economic uplift to achieve, thus UNICEF made the fatuous claim that vaccines could prevent malnutrition.
While it’s true as GAVI states that malnourished children are more likely to die from infections such as measles, as Australian Dr Archie Kalokerinos warned in 1973 following his investigation on behalf of the Northern Territories Government into the doubling of Aborigine infant deaths in a single year, malnourished children are more likely to die or suffer serious adverse effects after being vaccinated. Realising the link to a compulsory vaccination campaign Kalokerinos went to great effort to publicise his findings outside Australia. He was ignored by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC). UNICEF not only pushed universal vaccination, a decade later it doubled down. In 1988 its consultant Daniel Levy-Bruhl recommended prioritising malnourished and premature children for the 1988 Expanded [Universal] vaccination programme and shooting as many into them simultaneously in the first nine months as possible.
In the past two decades, GAVI has vaccinated 760million children and claims this has helped generate more than US $230billion in economic benefits in the countries served. This fanciful claim derives from modelling commissioned in 2015, some of which was done by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
What needs to be added to the reckoning is the unintended consequences of childhood vaccination – the increased prevalence of chronic disease. That may be about to change thanks to Secretary Robert Kennedy, President Trump’s new Health Secretary, who has long argued that the CDC should do a comparative study of health outcomes in vaccinated vs unvaccinated populations.
Kennedy says such a study could be done using the CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink which contains the health and vaccination records of 10million people, including hundreds of thousands of children. Kennedy says the CDC has never done such a study because it didn’t like the potential results: an African study showed that children had ten times the death rate of unvaccinated children while a US study of home-schooled children found that although they had lower rates of infectious diseases such as pertussis or chickenpox, they had 30x the incidence of allergic rhinitis, 3.9x the level of allergies, 4.2x the incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and 4x the level of autism.
If Secretary Rubio and President Trump ignore the emotional blackmail and follow through on their plans, the drastic cut to GAVI’s budget would not be the calamity that Dr Nishtar and the BBC would have you believe. The real calamity would be for pharmaceutical profits.
