As vaccine funding is slashed, the emotional blackmail begins [Article from 15/4/25]

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.

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