Made For Greater Things

"You're gonna make it if you try; they're gonna love you." -Roger Waters

While Mr. Ghebreyesus had quite a history in Ethiopia, on its surface, it doesn’t appear clearly explanative of his ascent to the top of the most visible health organization in the world.

A little bit of investigation, however, shows that Tedros had been forming the right alliances all along.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, has been referred to in the mainstream press as “the city that China built,” owing to China’s tremendous influence over its development.¹

Tedros himself was intimately involved with the Chinese government and a chief facilitator of this relationship². A 2015 New York Times article titled “Obama, on China’s Turf, Presents U.S. as a Better Partner for Africa,” datelined “ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia,” quoted Tedros’s not-so-subtle refusal to cut ties with his eastern benefactor despite the US’s apparent attempt to present itself as the preferable alternative.³

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Ethiopian foreign minister, said his country had strong relations with the United States but wanted more economic ties. “One area that lags behind is trade and investment,” he said.

Tedros’s loyalty did not go unnoticed. Per the Washington Post, China “worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help Tedros” win the WHO top spot.⁴

Such behavior was well in line with China’s bid to use international organizations to "reshape the international system to accommodate its political and economic interests,” a gambit in which the country "has consistently sought to trade financial incentives for votes, offering bribes and cancelling debt for countries that support them."⁵

Tedros’s WHO’s deference to China has been nothing short of legendary. For example, not only did Tedros affirm his commitment to Taiwan’s de facto exclusion the day after his electoral victory⁶, but it appears that top WHO staffers are unwilling to even mention Taiwan by name. A video of the degree to which this is the case, in which assistant Director-General Dr. Bruce Aylward appears to both play deaf and then hang up on a reporter in response to her question about the country, was described as “stunning” display of “Beijing’s power” by Axios’s China reporter.⁷⁸⁹ ¹⁰

The loyalty is mutual. As the Federalist points out, shortly after Tedros’s early fealty, “China decided to fund a new $80 million World Health Organization “Center for Disease Control” in … Ethiopia.”¹¹

An interesting nuance of the arrangement is how little China contributes to the WHO in any official capacity. As Dr. David Bell, former medical and scientific officer at the WHO, noted via email, China contributes less than the Bloomberg family and Nigeria, “yet they essentially control the leadership through diplomatic means to manage the DG election process”.¹²

China’s seemingly disproportionate influence serves more generally as a reminder that what is publicly available is often just the tip of the iceberg. A microcosm of this was detailed by Cochrane co-founder Dr. Peter Gotzsche in “Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime,”¹³

About 20 years ago, an incident alerted me to the way the industry buys friends. Clinical investigators from several countries had attended a planning meeting where we discussed various trials that both the company and we might be interested in. When we were on our way to a lavish dinner paid by the company, the person in charge of clinical trials in the company handed me an envelope, which I didn’t open till later… If you don’t send the money back, you have signaled that you might be willing to think you are even more valuable for the company next time… To pay cash leaves no trails.

Significantly, however, China wasn’t Tedros’s only supporter.

Post-presidency, Clinton Foundation founder Bill Clinton was heavily involved in philanthropy in Africa, famously enlisting the company of Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, and Jeffrey Epstein in a publicly heralded trip to the continent for “work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS” shortly after his foundation’s founding.

Epstein, having already visited the Clinton White House 17 times per the official visitor logs¹⁴, was reported to be in awe of the man who he’d fly on the Lolita Express over two dozen times¹⁵ (including to Little St. James according to both Virginia Roberts Giuffre¹⁶ and Clinton’s own former Deputy Assistant¹⁷).

In a piece written about a month after that journey, New York Magazine reported:¹⁸

here’s the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. “I invest in people — be it politics or science. It’s what I do,” he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president. In his eyes, Clinton as a species represents the highest evolutionary form of the political animal. To be up close to him, as he was during the African journey, is akin to seeing the rarest of beasts on a safari. As he put it to a friend upon his return from Africa, “If you were a boxer at the downtown gymnasium at 14th Street and Mike Tyson walked in, your face would have the same look as these foreign leaders had when Clinton entered the room. He is the world’s greatest politician.”

Chief among those wide-eyed leaders in Clinton’s Africa travels would be Tedros Ghebreyesus, who Clinton would later praise as effusively as Epstein had praised him, dubbing him a “rock star.”¹⁹

As Clinton would reminisce at around the midpoint of his keynote address at the third annual “Opportunity: Africa” conference in 2014,²⁰

the Gates foundation gave me some money… then Pfizer became our first big pharma partner… And Ethiopia… The Health Minister of Ethiopia, now the Foreign Minister—one of the ablest public servants I ever worked with.

(Tedros would go on to use this quote on his WHO Director-General campaign channel.²¹)

Tedros’s ability to garner western support, however, ran deeper even than the vastly influential Clinton Foundation.

As proudly trumpeted in his official WHO biography, while still Foreign Minister of Ethiopia, Tedros “led efforts to negotiate the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, in which 193 countries committed to the financing necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals” of Agenda 2030.²² (Critics of the summit were less enamored than the WHO would be, stating that it “merely handed over development to the private sector without adequate safeguards,” allowing companies to “use development money to generate profits, while the standards to ensure that companies comply with human rights remain non-binding guidelines.”)²³

More generally, TesfaNews, an independent outlet which covers “developments in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa”, revealed that Tedros was “known as ‘the donor darling minister’”²⁴ Politico used similar language, stating that Tedros had “helped make Ethiopia a darling of rich Western countries.”²⁵ Both articles cited the backing of none other than the WHO’s largest private donor, Bill Gates.

In fact, as far back as 2005, his very first year as Health Minister, Tedros had been made a coordinating board member²⁶ of the Gates-funded Stop TB Partnership,²⁷ and in 2008, was appointed to the board of Gates’s GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.²⁸

Tedros would go on to be lauded for vaccine campaigns with the GAVI Alliance (including WHO) at home in Ethiopia²⁹ (complaints from Amharic women notwithstanding).

Like Clinton, Gates would praise Tedros publicly³⁰, and in 2014 would be given an honorary degree at Addis Ababa University.

After the ceremony, Gates and Tedros sat down and had a discussion, taking questions from the audience. Questioned about Ethiopia’s undemocratic government, Tedros argued that “democratization takes longer than economic development”.³¹

Tedros’s apparent supporters all get on well together. As far back as 2006, Gates and Clinton were being referred to in tandem as the “first super NGO”³², Clinton, of course, had Chinagate³³³⁴³⁵, and Gates has always been profoundly pro-China and China pro-Gates, with China granting Gates among nation’s highest academic honors³⁶ and Gates trumpeting the rise of its empire as “a huge win for the world”.³⁷

In 2017, a Politico article titled “Meet the world’s most powerful doctor: Bill Gates” relayed a French diplomat’s take that in the contentious election for who would replace China’s Margaret Chan as Director-General of the WHO, Gates “…support[ed] Tedros, having funded health programs in his country when he was health minister,” despite the Gates Foundation’s own officials stating that this was disallowed, per Gates’s chief officialdom at a foundation that “cannot take a position given that it is not a voting member country and thus has to remain neutral.”³⁸

The article went on to quote Sophie Harman, associate professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London, who stated bluntly, “All of the candidates are going to have to ally with him in some way.”

Whatever the the truth of the matter, Tedros won out.

The other candidates, far more qualified by conventional medical and scientific standards, found themselves left out in the “Bill Chill,”³⁹ the public health community’s hushed name for the Siberian winter beyond the gates of Bill’s shockingly pervasive monopolization of global health.⁴⁰

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Finale

1. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/addis-ababa-china-construction-style/index.html

2. http://perth.china-consulate.gov.cn/eng/jbwzlm/xw/201401/t20140111_257227.htm

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/world/africa/obama-on-chinas-turf-presents-us-as-a-better-partner-for-africa.html

4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/10/25/another-week-another-scandal-at-the-united-nations/

5. https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/usa-wipo-03052020135826.html

6. https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2017-05/25/content_29490343.htm

7. http://web.archive.org/web/20200419112954/https://twitter.com/BethanyAllenEbr/status/1243911166814031872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiTcISH415U

9. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8172031/WHO-official-allegedly-refuses-address-Taiwan-appears-hang-journalist.html

10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A01h5GETWZE

11. https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/17/u-s-funds-world-health-organization-that-boot-licks-china-with-deadly-results/

12. https://open.who.int/2022-23/contributors/contributor

13. https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Medicines-Organised-Crime-Healthcare/dp/1846198844

14. https://nypost.com/2021/12/02/jeffrey-epstein-visited-clinton-white-house-at-least-17-times-report/

15. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/confessions-of-a-clintonworld-exile

16. https://nypost.com/2020/07/31/jeffrey-epstein-hosted-bill-clinton-on-private-island-court-docs/amp/

17. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/confessions-of-a-clintonworld-exile

18. https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/

19. https://grandstrategy.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Bradley%20et%20al_Grand%20Strategy_Ethiopia_GH%20Gov%202011.pdf

20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPop-147AzY

21. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpELK8pCu8c

22. https://www.who.int/director-general/biography#:~:text=Born%20in%20the%20Eritrean%20city,University%20of%20Nottingham%20and%20an

23. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/16/financing-for-development-summit-outcome-addis-ababa-milestone-millstone-poverty

24. https://tesfanews.net/ethiopia-tedros-adhanom-qualifications-next-who-director-general/

25. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/07/world-health-organization-tedros-adhanom-ghebreyesus-242030

26. https://stoptb.org/assets/documents/about/cb/meetings/Final_Board_Report_08.pdf

27. https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-health/tuberculosis

28. https://www.gavi.org/gavi-welcomes-election-of-new-who-chief

29. https://reliefweb.int/report/ethiopia/ethiopia-bringing-child-pneumonia-deaths-down-zero

30. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/transcript-bill-melinda-gates-talk-takeaway

31. https://www.ethiosports.com/2014/07/26/bill-gates-receives-honorary-degree-from-addis-ababa-university/

32. https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/efforts-of-gates-clinton-foundations-increasingly-overlap

33. https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/larry-elder-collusion-what-about-chinagate-and-ted-kennedys-outreach-to-the-ussr/

34. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy

35. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYB1YI7daMw

36. https://www.chinausfocus.com/news/bill-gates-given-one-of-chinas-highest-academic-honours

37. https://www.forbes.com/sites/russellflannery/2023/01/26/bill-gates-sees-chinas-rise-as-a-huge-win-for-the-world/?sh=59abe4897ad0

38. https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/

39. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/not-many-speak-their-mind-to-gates-foundation/

40. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/28/global-health-disruptors-the-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation/