Gates Foundation controls and manipulates WHO Malaria policy

[Fash]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/17/ ... /gates.php

The chief of the malaria program at the World Health Organization has complained that the growing dominance of malaria research by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation risks stifling a diversity of views among scientists and wiping out the health agency's policy-making function.

In a memorandum, the chief of the malaria program, Arata Kochi, complained to his boss, Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, that the foundation's money, while crucial, could have "far-reaching, largely unintended consequences."

Many of the world's leading malaria scientists are now "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," Kochi wrote. Because "each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of the others," he wrote, getting independent reviews of research proposals "is becoming increasingly difficult."

Also, he argued, the foundation's determination to have its favored research used to guide the health organization's recommendations "could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health."

Tadataka Yamada, executive director of the global health program at the Gates Foundation, disagreed with Kochi's conclusions, saying the foundation did not second-guess or "hold captive" scientists or research partnerships that it backed. "We encourage a lot of external review," he said.

The memo, which was obtained by The New York Times, was written late last year but circulated last week to the heads of several health agency departments, with a note asking whether they were having similar struggles with the Gates Foundation.

A spokeswoman for the director general said Chan saw the memo last year but did not respond to it. It is "the view of one department, not the WHO's view," said the spokeswoman, Christine McNab. The agency has cordial relations with the foundation and the agency's policies are set by committees, which include others beside Gates-financed scientists, she said.

The Gates Foundation has poured about $1.2 billion into malaria research since 2000. In the late 1990s, as little as $84 million a year was spent - largely by the U.S. military and health institutes, along with European governments and foundations. Drug makers had largely abandoned the field. (China was developing a drug, artemisinin, that is now the cornerstone of treatment.)

The World Health Organization is a United Nations agency with a $4 billion budget. It gives advice on policies, evaluates treatments - especially for poor countries - maintains a network of laboratories and sends teams to fight outbreaks of diseases, like avian flu or Ebola. It finances little research; for diseases of the poor, the Gates Foundation is the biggest donor in the world.

Kochi, an openly undiplomatic official who won admiration for reorganizing the world fight against tuberculosis but was ousted from that job partly because he offended donors like the Rockefeller Foundation, called the Gates Foundation's decision making "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself."

Moreover, he added, the foundation "even takes its vested interest to seeing the data it helped generate taken to policy."

As an example, he cited an intervention called intermittent preventive treatment for infants, known as IPTi.

Other experts said IPTi involved giving babies doses of an older anti-malaria drug, Fansidar, when they got their shots at 2 months, 3 months and 9 months. In early studies, it was shown to decrease malaria cases about 25 percent. But each dose provided protection for only a month.

Since it is not safe or practical to give Fansidar constantly to babies because it is a sulfa drug that can cause rare but deadly reactions and because Fansidar-resistant malaria is growing, World Health Organization scientists had doubts about it.

Nonetheless, Kochi wrote, although it was "less and less straightforward" that the health agency should recommend it, the agency's objections were met with "intense and aggressive opposition" from Gates-backed scientists and the foundation. The WHO, he wrote, needs to "stand up to such pressures and ensure that the review of evidence is rigorously independent of vested interests."

Amir Attaran, a health policy expert at the University of Ottawa who has criticized many players in the war on malaria, said he thought Kochi's memo was "dead right." His own experience with Gates-financed policy groups, he said, was that they are cowed into "stomach-churning group think." But Attaran said he believed that scientists were not afraid of the foundation, but of its chief for malaria, Regina Rabinovich, whom he described as "autocratic."

Rabinovich, when told of Attaran's characterization, said she did not want to respond. Yamada of the Gates Foundation called it "unfortunate and inaccurate."

"I'm not a grantee of hers," he said, "but she's an extremely knowledgeable leader. And if she has an opinion, she's entitled to it." He said he did not know the details of the IPTi issue, but added that researchers often differed about policy implications.

There have been hints in recent months that the World Health Organization feels threatened by the growing power of the Gates Foundation. Some scientists have said privately that the foundation was "creating its own WHO."

One oft-cited example is its $105 million grant to create the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Its mission is to judge, for example, which treatments work or to rank countries' health systems.

These are core WHO tasks, but the institute's new director, Christopher J.L. Murray, formerly a health organization official, said a new path was needed because the UN agency came under pressure from member countries.

He said his institute would be independent of that.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has taken over important research simply by funding it, and is pushing their own agenda into UN/WHO policy without sufficient review or openness... Awesome, there really is nothing like perverting the scientific method. It's becoming far too common these days.

[Animale]

And here is an example of what I mentioned in the Lvs.C thread... a place where the Objectivist/Rockefeller mode of public service can run into troubles. I completely understand how the donor wishes to have control over where and how their money is spent, but sometimes the actual needs of the science and/or goals of the problem don't mesh with the ideals of ideas of the donor. Ironically, this is also the strength of this model as individualistic actions can be faster and more pointed than government work.

The strength (and weakness in some cases) of government is that, ideally, it can institutionally insulate itself from individual biases in favor of consensus opinion. Sometimes that slows things down, but often the measured approach is the best. Once government gets going its hard to stop its power, (again, both a good and bad thing) and that allows it to accomplish things that may not be accomplished by individual donors.

The conflict here is, as mentioned, that the individual donor wishes to merely "buy up" the field and make it fit inside their world - which works in business (Rockefeller and Gates are of course famous for this) but doesn't always work in the world of philanthropy. Hopefully this can come to a meaningful compromise that actually helps people on the ground instead of developing into a big infight, time will tell.

Animale

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

If you don't like the direction the boss(Gates) is going, then quit and work for someone else.

[Boogahz]

?

Bill Gates runs the World Health Organization?

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

I dunno, does he?

[Spang]

Bill Gates runs Microsoft.

Bill Gates donates money to other organizations.

Bill Gates is a philanthropist.

[Boogahz]

If you don't like the direction the boss(Gates) is going, then quit and work for someone else.

?

Bill Gates runs the World Health Organization?

I dunno, does he?

You seem to think so. The short answer is, No. So, knowing that, what would "the boss" comment have to do with the WHO?

[Midnyte_Ragebringer]

I read the article. I then read Animales post. I then responded. Folks seem to think since he is a big donor and has requested the research be steered in a certain direction, it is wrong. Then quit and go somewhere else. The others gave him the unofficial title of boss, not I.

[Ashur]

I doubt this is a case of Bill Gates trying to manipulate the WHO through his foundation and more a case of a research lab they just happened to be the funder for pushing their own agenda.

[Nick]

The answer is quite simple Boogahz, he's been trolling Animale for ages because Animale makes him look like a bloody downs victim every time they discuss Climate change.

By Midnyte's reasoning, everyone who's involved should simply quit if they don't like it instead of making a complaint, because that's in Midnyte's world that's how the world improves. Sadly, the achilles heel of this argument is that he is a total moron who cataclysmically fails in even beginning to understand the role of the WHO and the majority of the people who work there.