Why We Don't Want Bill and Melinda Gates Controlling the WHO Response to Ebola — The 'Donations' Always Come With Massive Strings Attached

Photo by Jules Antonio.

By Margaret Kimberley, BAR
Sierra Leone has waved the white flag in the face of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD). Its meager infrastructure has buckled under the onslaught of a disease which could have been curtailed. The announcement that infected patients will be treated at home because there is no longer the capacity to treat them in hospitals is a surrender which did not have to happen. Not only did Europe and the United States turn a blind eye to sick and dying Africans but they did so with the help of an unlikely perpetrator.

The World Health Organization is “the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system.” Its very name implies that it takes direction from and serves the needs of people all over the world but the truth is quite different. The largest contributor to the WHO budget is not a government. It is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which provides more funding than either the United States or the United Kingdom. WHO actions and priorities are no longer the result of the consensus of the world’s people but top down decision making from wealthy philanthropists.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may appear to be a savior when it provides $300 million to the WHO budget, but those dollars come with strings attached. WHO director general Dr. Margaret Chan admitted as much when she said, “My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests.” Instead of being on the front line when a communicable disease crisis appears, it spends its time administering what Gates and his team have determined is best.

The Ebola horror continues as it has for the last ten months in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The cruelty of the world’s lack of concern for Africa and all Africans in the diaspora was evident by the inaction of nations and organizations that are supposed to respond in times of emergencies. While African governments and aid organizations sounded the alarm the WHO did little because its donor driven process militates against it. The world of private dollars played a role in consigning thousands of people to death.

Critics of the Gates Foundation appeared long before this current Ebola outbreak. In 2008 the WHO’s malaria chief, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained about the conflicts of interest created by the foundation. In an internal memo leaked to the New York Times he complained that the world’s top malaria researchers were “locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group.” In other words, the standards of independent peer reviewed research were cast aside in order to please the funder.

Private philanthropy is inherently undemocratic. It is a top down driven process in which the wealthy individual tells the recipient what they will and will not do. This is a problematic system for charities of all kinds and is disastrous where the health of world’s people is concerned. Health care should be a human right, not a charity, and the world’s governments should determine how funds to protect that right are spent. One critic put it very pointedly. “…the Gates Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates, do not believe in the public sector, they do not believe in a democratic, publically owned, publically accountable system.”

There is little wonder why the Ebola outbreak caught the WHO so flat footed as they spent months making mealy mouthed statements but never coordinating an effective response. The Gates foundation is the WHO boss, not governments, and if they weren’t demanding action, then the desperate people affected by Ebola weren’t going to get any.

Privatization of public resources is a worldwide scourge. Education, pensions, water, and transportation are being taken out of the hands of the public and given to rich people and corporations. The Ebola crisis is symptomatic of so many others which go unaddressed or improperly addressed because no one wants to bite the hands that do the feeding.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged an additional $50 million to fight the current Ebola epidemic but that too is problematic, as Director General Chan describes. “When there’s an event, we have money. Then after that, the money stops coming in, then all the staff you recruited to do the response, you have to terminate their contracts.” The WHO should not be lurching from crisis to crisis, SARS, MERS, or H1N1 influenza based on the whims of philanthropy. The principles of public health should be carried out by knowledgeable medical professionals who are not dependent upon rich people for their jobs.

The Gates are not alone in using their deep pockets to confound what should be publicly held responsibilities. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was contributing $25 million to fight Ebola. His donation will go to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. Most Americans are probably unaware that such a foundation even exists. Yet there it is, run by a mostly corporate board which will inevitably interfere with the public good. The WHO and its inability to coordinate the fight against Ebola tells us that public health is just that, public. If the CDC response to Ebola in the United States fails it may be because it falls prey to the false siren song of giving private interests control of the people’s resources and responsibilities.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Obama’s Cynical, Stilted Response to Ebola in Africa vs. Cuba’s Magnificent Mobilization

“Obama would prefer not to set any precedent of supplying health care to the African citizenry.”

Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Glen Ford, BAR

“After centuries of fattening the colonial bat, the Ebola-afflicted countries have almost no structural defenses against even the tiniest invaders.”

The World Health Organization is warning that the Ebola virus is now killing 70 percent of those infected in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, with new cases projected to reach 10,000 per week by December. There is nothing in place or in the plans of the “international community” that will prevent the excruciating death of tens of thousands before the year is out; the short term outcome is already written in the ghastly patterns of contagion. No one knows what lies beyond the computable boundaries of this viral conflagration, but its origin is far from mysterious. The real vector of mass death that is stalking West Africa is not the fruit bat, but a global system of plunder that has rendered vast swaths of humanity hyper-vulnerable to the predations of micro-organisms and their fellow man.

Millions of Africans are among the pre-dead – marked for extermination through disease, hunger, war and the myriad other components of imperialism – the beast that, like some species of bats, can only survive by gorging on the blood of others, leaving its victims weak and pathogen-ridden. After centuries of fattening the colonial bat, the Ebola-afflicted countries have almost no structural defenses against even the tiniest invaders. Liberia and Guinea have only one doctor for every 100,000 citizens; Sierra Leone has two.

These statistics ensure that large numbers of Africans are condemned to early, painful deaths. The system guarantees it – NOT the three nations’ health care systems, which do not exist in any meaningful sense, but a global capitalist system that forces developing nations to eliminate public services or face economic strangulation and regime change. Doctors disappear, or are never trained, or drain their brains to foreign lands, or serve only the rich. Public health is a fiction, and epidemics are inevitable.

We're Losing The Fight Against Ebola

Health workers in Liberia. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Tom Miles and Kate Kelland
The number of new Ebola cases in West Africa is growing faster than authorities can manage them, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday, renewing a call for health workers from around the world to go to the region to help.

As the death toll rose to more than 2,400 people out of 4,784 cases, WHO director general Margaret Chan said the vast nature of the outbreak -- particularly in the three hardest-hit countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone -- required a massive emergency response.

"The Ebola outbreak that is ravaging parts of West Africa is the largest and most complex and most severe in the almost four-decade history of this disease," she told reporters on an international teleconference from Geneva.

"The number of new patients is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them. We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks."

Chan called for urgent international support in sending doctors, nurses, medical supplies and aid to the worst-affected countries.

"The thing we need most is people," she said. "The right people, the right specialists, and specialists who are appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe."

The Ebola infection rate and death toll have been particularly high among health workers, who are exposed to hundreds of highly infectious patients who can pass the virus on through body fluids such as blood and excrement.

Some foreign healthcare workers, including several Americans and at least one Briton, have also become infected while working with patients in West Africa.

Speaking at the same briefing, Cuba's minister for public health, Roberto Morales Ojeda, said his country would be sending 165 healthcare workers to help in the fight - the largest contingent of foreign doctors and nurses to be committed so far.

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African Ebola Survivors Share Their Stories of Recovery and Stigma (Video)

Saah Tambah describes his ebola ordeal. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By Rakotomalala
According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, 2,615 cases of Ebola have been reported throughout West Africa and 1,427 people have world's worst outbreak of the virus. There is no confirmed cure for Ebola, and the mortality rate for the latest outbreak sits at around 50 percent – although previous outbreaks have seen up to 90 percent of the infected perish.

died in what is being described as the

Those who have survived Ebola have remarkable tales of resilience and heroic care from local health workers, but also of sadness and rejection because of ignorance about the disease.

On Aug. 20, the WHO published a video on YouTube showcasing three of those survivors: Saah Tambah and Harrison Sakilla from Liberia and Matu Kamara from Sierra Leone.

Saah Tambah explains how he became infected and his life since his recovery:

I got the Ebola from an uncle in Koindu. I went to visit him for two nights because there was no one to take care of him. After a few days, he died and then his wife and daughter died too [..] I started vomiting and suffered from diarrhea so I went to the clinic. When I got sick, my family doubted my recovery. Thank god for the doctors. They gave me a certificate that indicates I am free of Ebola in case anyone would still doubt. 

Harrison Sakilla, 39, is from Foya in the north of Liberia. He is the first survivor from his area. He lost his mother to the disease. He says:

I got the disease caring for my mother. If someone starts to see symptoms, one should go to an Ebola health center. They will provide care and one can make it out.   

Matu Kamara, 52, says she lost her sister and her child to Ebola:

My daughter felt sick after caring from my husband's other wife. She was feeling cold. I took her to the hospital and they gave her medicine. She felt better but then later she started vomiting. She died in our arms. I felt sick and began vomiting. I went to the hospital and two days later, I felt better. We survivors from this sickness need a certificate to show to people that we had Ebola and we were treated. Do not wait to become very sick before going to the hospital.   

People who recover from the disease often face heartbreaking post-survival rejection because of a lack of understanding of how the disease spreads.Such is the story of Dr. Melvin Korkor, a doctor of Phebe hospital in Liberia. Korkor has survived Ebola but he explains that his relatives and friends were weary of touching him, as reported on the Liberian-based Front Page Africa Online:

Even though Korkor said he has been cleared of Ebola, he says that people avoid him. ‘Now, everywhere in my neighborhood, all the looks bore into me like I’m the plague,” he said. FrontPageAfrica reporter who trailed the Phebe doctor on Cuttington campus Monday observed that people left places when he showed up while friends, students and loved ones avoided his handshake or eat with him [...] “Thanks to God, I am cured. But now I have a new disease: the stigmatization that I am a victim of,” Korkor was quoted by a local radio station in Gbarnga. ‘This disease (the stigma) is worse than the fever.

Liberia is one of the four countries dealing with the outbreak, alongside Guinea, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

Claudius Barnawolo, a Liberian physician's assistant, also beat the odds and survived Ebola. Front Page Africa Online recorded his testimony and his family members who also felt the stigma of rejection from their community:

Awareness about Ebola and how it is spread remains a challenge. Côte d'Ivoire has started an important Ebola prevention campaign, even though no cases has been detected yet. Ivorian bloggers have repurposed the viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for Ebola awareness using the French-language hashtag #moussercontreEbola (lather up against Ebola):

The work of lab scientists such as Dr. Korkor or Barnawolo to detect and sort out whether ailing patients have Ebola virus is also crucial in fighting the epidemic. Abdoulaye Bah, a volunteer author and translator for Global Voices, highlighted their work in Liberia (via Jina Moore):

Jeejuah, 30, and two other women, all volunteers, are cooking for 12 of the most important, but invisible, people in Liberia right now. The dozen meals are meant for the team of technicians that tests the blood of suspected Ebola patients. They visit sick peoples’ homes and overwhelmed Ebola treatment centers, sticking needles in the veins of physically unpredictable, highly contagious people. They then drive their blood back to Liberia’s only medical lab, more than an hour from the capital of Monrovia.

Evidently fighting (and surviving) Ebola will take a tremendous deal of collective effort in the affected countries, especially considering the stigma inside and outside their borders.In the context of this epidemic, it has never been more crucial for the communities to realize that they need to get organized together in this struggle or they will perish together as fools.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.