Who “Owns” the WHO’s COVID-19 Response?

The excellent commentator on pharmacological matters, @gutwat1, suggests in a tweet thread that the C19 vax should be regarded as an adulterated drug on account of quality issues, and she asks whether regulatory standards were lowered under WHO guidance. I understand her to mean, more precisely, the BioNTech-“Pfizer” vaccine, since it is, after all, the standard C19 jab in the West and she has written extensively on it.

In the final tweet in her thread, she notes:

The WHO had written draft guidance by the end of 2020 that stated

-regulatory flexibility required

-manufacturing stds may be “good enough”

-incomplete data acceptable and adjust as data comes in

Were the regulators working under WHO rules?

Assumed sufficient for EUA?

Why?

Well, a look at the funding of the WHO’s COVID-19 response – or, in full, its COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan (SPRP) – provides an obvious clue as to why. Below are 2020 SPRP funding numbers taken directly from the WHO’s own database.

Germany was far and away the leading funder of the WHO’s C19 response: Germany, whose “state virologist” Christian Drosten developed the C19 PCR test that would be made the standard for establishing the very existence of a C19 pandemic; and, above all, Germany, which is the state sponsor of the BioNTech-“Pfizer” vaccine that has become the privileged instrument for responding to that pandemic in the West.

I have provided detailed documentation of Germany’s sponsorship of BioNTech and its vaccine in my article for the Brownstone Institute here. The European Union, as also documented in the article, served as a secondary sponsor of BioNTech; and, as the graph makes clear, the European Commission also played a prominent – but, as compared to Germany, far inferior – role in the WHO’s C19 response funding. Germany alone provided nearly one-third of the WHO’s C19 response funding in 2020; Germany and the EU together, nearly 40%.

Note that Germany, a country around one-fourth the size of the USA in terms of population, provided more than ten times more C19-response funding than the USA. Note too that Bill Gates or, more precisely, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – which is often supposed to be “behind” the C19 vaccines and the WHO’s vaccine-centric C19 response – is not to be found among the funding leaders. You need to scroll down to 18th place in the ranking to find it, with a contribution of all of $14 million. (As can be easily verified elsewhere on the WHO website, most of the Gates WHO funding in fact goes to polio eradication.)

Moreover, as the below funding figures makes clear, in 2021, the first full year of the global C19 vaccination campaign, German funding of the WHO’s C19 response became even more preponderant. Germany alone now represents over 40% of total funding! Germany plus the EU over half!

These funding figures can be consulted on the WHO website here. Note that the link lands on the current funding year (2022). You need to select the desired SPRP year in the upper left to see previous years.

Given Germany’s predominant role in funding the WHO’s C19 response, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that the committee that was convened by the organization’s Director-General to review the WHO’s existing International Health Regulations in light of the C19 pandemic is chaired by none other than Lothar Wieler. But, nonetheless, it is somewhat surprising. For Lothar Wieler is at the same time the sitting president of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The RKI is roughly the equivalent of the USA’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The WHO committee is known as the Review Committee on the Functioning of the International Health Regulations during COVID-19. See, for instance, Wieler’s statement in this somewhat odd dual capacity of committee chair and RKI president here.

Lothar Wieler is undoubtedly the single German official most closely connected to Germany’s own Covid-19 response. (Despite his prominence in the media, Drosten, by contrast, does not occupy an official position.) To get an idea of the significance of Wieler chairing this key WHO committee – while still very much occupying his key position in the German government! – one need only imagine, say, Anthony Fauci chairing the same committee while still serving as director of NIAID.