As two US nurses are declared Ebola-free, a new case crops up, this time in NYC.
Authorities in New York confirmed on Thursday night that a doctor who had recently returned to his home in Harlem after working for Doctors Without Borders in Guinea helping treat patients with Ebola had tested positive for the disease and had been put in isolation at a Manhattan hospital.
It’s a new episode in a terrifying farce.
NYPD Stunner: Cops Exit Ebola Victim Apartment, Dump Gloves, Masks In Sidewalk Trash Can
Ebola has now reached Mali.
Mali’s health minister says the West African country has confirmed its first case of Ebola.
Worse still, the baby girl in Mali is reported to have been bleeding from her nose while she traveled from Guinea on a bus that stopped in several towns in Mali. WHO is now warning that a large number of people may have been exposed to the girl while she was infectious.
Criticism of the WHO seems to be mounting.
The epidemic has exposed a disconnect between the aspirations of global health officials and the reality of infectious disease control. Officials hold faraway strategy sessions about fighting emerging diseases and bioterrorism even as front-line doctors and nurses don’t have enough latex gloves, protective gowns, rehydrating fluid or workers to carry bodies to the morgue.
“We cannot wait for those high-level meetings to convene and discuss over cocktails and petits fours what they’re going to do,” exclaimed Joanne Liu, international head of Doctors Without Borders, when she heard about another U.N. initiative. Her group was among the first to respond to the viral conflagration, and it kept its staff in West Africa throughout the crisis.
And if you follow the money, here’s a revelation about what’s been going on inside the WHO.
The WHO is governed by the 194-nation World Health Assembly, in which, as Garrett put it, “Vanuatu and China” have equal voting power. Throughout the early 2000s, the member states consistently failed to vote to raise their own membership dues, “so in 2013 they were paying the same dues based on per capita GDP that they were in the 1980s. The core budget, adjusted for inflation, was going steadily downhill.”
This meant that donations from rich countries and private entities like the Gates Foundation had to fill the gap. But these donors can earmark their donations for specific issues—say, HIV/AIDS or smoking prevention. As former WHO assistant director-general Jack Chow put it in 2010, this means the budget is “increasingly divvied up before it ever reaches the WHO.” Margaret Chan herself acknowledged this problem in a recent interview, saying, “My budget [is] highly earmarked, so it is driven by what I call donor interests. 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.”
“There was more and more of a sense that if you’re part of the developing world, if you’ve left the ranks of the impoverished world, you no longer think that infectious diseases are part of your agenda,” says Garrett. “You become part of the rich club when you start worrying about cancer and heart disease. So there was a lot of pressure to shift the priorities of the organization away from disease identification and rapid response and toward normalizing programs for treatment and prevention of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc.”
Not just Gates earmarking money for specific issues, I bet. But almost certainly Michael Bloomberg as well. And maybe others too. Here are WHO’s 2008 donors.
Was the WHO in effect bought by Gates and Bloomberg and co.? As core funding gradually dried up, did rich “philanthropists” like Michael Bloomberg step in with offers of money to fund WHO antismoking and other lifestyle initiatives? So that while there was plenty of money to fund gigs like the recent closed-door FCTC conference in Moscow, attended by WHO Director General Margaret Chan, there was next to nothing left for latex gloves and protective gowns in West Africa.
Maybe this is the complete explanation of the WHO’s shift to lifestyle medicine, which got seriously under way with the arrival of Gro Harlem Brundtland in the 1990s. Maybe that was when antismoking ideologues like Bloomberg started buying influence, and began to gradually twist the WHO to their own ends?
This means essentially that the WHO is up for grabs to the highest donors, and that it must set its health policies and projects on those issues, which will bring in the most donations. In other words, its global health priorities are now being determined by what appeals to its biggest donors rather than by the actual needs of the world’s poorest and sickest populations, the very population WHO was set up to serve.
And that’s why we’re now seeing scenes like this in West Africa:
Bodies lying on the floor of Redemption Hospital, Monrovia
Frank Davis 
Frank, I suspect this hits the nail on the head.
Because the same happened on a smaller scale in England in local NHS community work funding. Where at one time we would have quite a lot of experienced community-based and medically-qualified staff employed (some used to be called District Nurses: remember them?), the central funding for whatever they were working on dried up. So new streams of central government funding were looked for: one of the easiest to access and largest was to do with the new toy of smoking cessation. Experienced local staff who knew their patches and who used to deal with nit and louse infestations, basic child nutrition and hygiene, contraception, and who ‘put in a word for’ poor families to get better housing for an ailing bronchial baby ended up on smoking cessation teams. Because it was the only way to keep their jobs going and their undoubted skills used. So it became smoking cessation with a bit of nit and louse infestations, nutrition, and contraception thrown in on the side when no-one was looking.
Ths seemed to happen at about the same time Public Health stopped protecting us from the environment and starting trying to protect the environment from us.
The World Health Organization,WHO, established by the United Nations in 1948 and based in Geneva, built its outstanding reputation on funding research and programs to fight communicable diseases. Today, WHO, with its 192 member nations, continues to coordinate and sponsor international efforts directed at treatment and control of worldwide health problems, such as AIDS, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and a host of other diseases.
In the 1980�s, however, the organization expanded its attention to noncommunicable disease, although it was limited by a budget frozen at $450 million. Today, the international agency now takes in more than $500 million a year, more than it gets from all its member nations. This money comes primarily from drug companies whose fortunes are intimately connected to its donations to WHO.
Although spokesmen deny WHO is influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, the drug companies� internal documents give another perspective. According to the Seattle Times Daphne Fresle, a former top official in the WHO office that monitors worldwide pharmaceutical use, resigned in protest in 2002, complaining of the agency’s relationships with drug makers. Unpublished documents of WHO reports first obtained by The Guardian newspaper in 2003 describe “undue influence” on guideline panels dealing with diets and food additives.
http://www.easydiagnosis.com/secondopinions/newsletter18.html
Well I will be damned and I found that link and blasted it everywhere over the last 4 years but I never read the rest of it……………..sweet find there Wiel…….
Now if the other nations have it fixed so they don’t have to put up much at all from the get go. It sounds to me like they the nations had already set about a way to destroy the WHO anti-tobacco agenda from the very beginning.
Even here in the states the states have steadily reduced anti-tobacco funding to near nothing for years. Then ole Stanton Glantz does a new junk study whining about how Californias own funding is going away for anti-tobacco activities.
Now if its left up to Bloomy and Gates to keep the movement alive or whatever they are dreaming up,they basically own the WHO as Big Pharma is getting reamed by countries for BRIBERY in China and other places………
It could well be Pharmas fixing to get from the lawyers what they did to Big tobacco and also from politicians………
Could be Big Tobacco will be back in the political drives seat in the end as they were 40 years ago.
“…Unpublished documents of WHO reports first obtained by The Guardian newspaper in 2003 describe “undue influence” on guideline panels dealing with diets and food additives.”
And what does this have to do with tobacco? NOTHING. We’re supposed to be conditioned to froth at the mouth just because someone says “Big Pharma,” I suppose.
It seems Bill Gates wasted no time in moving to try and head off tobacco being the savior of Ebola
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The drug, ZMapp, is made by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. Mapp and its partners have had early discussions with Amgen Inc. (AMGN) about the feasibility of increasing production of the antibody cocktail using a traditional biotechnology manufacturing technique, said Bryan Callahan, a senior program officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The foundation gave Mapp a $150,000 grant to look at whether a new large-scale production technique is possible. “No final decision has been made on the pharma partner,” Callahan said in an e-mail. Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, California, is the world’s biggest biotechnology company by sales.
ZMapp is currently made using tobacco plants, which can be induced to grow the antibodies in the drug. Federal officials have also considered an expanded tobacco-based production process.
New Method Sought to Make Ebola Drug Grown From Tobacco
By Robert Langreth and Makiko Kitamura Oct 10, 2014 11:01 PM CT 16 Comments Email
Biotechnology researchers and U.S. officials are rushing to try to make more of what may be the most promising experimental drug to treat Ebola after supply ran out in August.
The drug, ZMapp, is made by Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc. Mapp and its partners have had early discussions with Amgen Inc. (AMGN) about the feasibility of increasing production of the antibody cocktail using a traditional biotechnology manufacturing technique, said Bryan Callahan, a senior program officer with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The foundation gave Mapp a $150,000 grant to look at whether a new large-scale production technique is possible. “No final decision has been made on the pharma partner,” Callahan said in an e-mail. Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, California, is the world’s biggest biotechnology company by sales.
ZMapp is currently made using tobacco plants, which can be induced to grow the antibodies in the drug. Federal officials have also considered an expanded tobacco-based production process.
The cocktail of three antibodies has been used to treat two Ebola-infected American health workers who recovered, a Spanish priest who died and three Liberian health workers.
Mapp, a closely held, San Diego-based company, developed ZMapp with the Public Health Agency of Canada and the U.S. government. For now, production has been limited to a handful of doses. That’s far too few to have an impact on the current outbreak in West Africa that, according to the World Health Organization, has infected more than 8,000 people, killing about half.
Tobacco Plants
To produce therapeutic proteins inside a tobacco plant, genes for the desired antibodies are fused to genes for a natural tobacco virus. The tobacco plants are then infected with the artificial virus, producing the antibodies. The plants are then ground up and the antibodies extracted.
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation said yesterday its $150,000 grant would look at the possibility of using Chinese hamster ovary cells, similar to how many other complex biotechnology drugs are made, Callahan said. While the technique “offers a slower route than plant production, the infrastructure for manufacturing in CHO cells is well established, which means that production can be scaled up rapidly,” he said.
Kristen Davis, an Amgen spokeswoman, said the company was “in discussions with the Gates Foundation and other organizations to see if Amgen can help with this effort.”
The Texas A&M Center for Innovation in Advanced Development & Manufacturing is in daily talks with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services about how it and its partner, Caliber Biotherapeutics LLC, can product large quantities of ZMapp from tobacco plants, a Texas A&M official said.
Drug Manufacturing
“We possess high capabilities for production in plants, which is the process necessary for manufacturing the experimental Ebola therapeutic, ZMapp,” Brett P. Giroir, chief executive office of the Texas A&M Health Science Center, in an e-mailed statement.
The Caliber facility could produce 25 kilograms to 75 kilograms of ZMapp antibody per year, based on preliminary estimates, starting within weeks to months of an order from the U.S., Giroir said. The production facility and its capabilities were created in a joint effort between Texas A&M and Caliber, he said.
ZMapp is difficult to make in large quantities for a number of reasons, researchers said. It involves three antibodies, which triples the amount of tobacco plants needed. In addition, the dose used to treat patients is high compared with many drugs, increasing the needed supply.
Timeline Unpredictable
How long it will take to develop an efficient production system “is unpredictable,” said Charles Arntzen, a plant biotechnology expert at Arizona State University. “This is a biological challenge and we are developing the rules and processes as we go along.”
Caliber Biotherapeutics “is by far the largest facility in the world” for producing pharmaceuticals in tobacco plants, said Robert Kay, CEO of iBio Inc., a Newark, Delaware-based biotechnology company that owns one of the technologies used to make drugs in tobacco plants. “If anybody is going to produce this, it is almost axiomatic it has to be with Caliber involved.” Caliber didn’t immediately return a phone message left at its offices.
While it is unclear what the best dose of ZMapp is, by some estimates, the 25 kilograms to 75 kilograms may translate into enough of the drug to treat several thousand patients.
Kay estimates the production capacity of Caliber is about 100 kilograms of ZMapp per year, which he said could yield enough to treat 20,000 patients with the drug cocktail.
Kentucky Production
The original supply of ZMapp drug was produced in tobacco leaves at a plant biotechnology facility, Kentucky BioProcessing LLC, a unit of Reynolds American Inc.
Kentucky BioProcessing has “completely rebooted” its production plans to focus exclusively on making more ZMapp, said David Howard, a spokesman for Kentucky BioProcessing at parent company Reynolds American Inc.
“All of our attention and all our efforts right now are on the production of more of the ZMapp compound,” Howard said. “We are starting to produce amounts of the compound right now as we speak.”
Ebola is normally treated by keeping patients hydrated, and using antibiotics to fight off opportunistic infections. The hope is that a patient’s immune system will eventually fight off the virus’s aggressive attack.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-10/new-method-sought-to-make-ebola-drug-grown-from-tobacco.html
Harley, The tobacco plant producing ZMAPP is a cousin to the plant whose leaves we enjoy so much.
Bill Gate et al has something different (and far costlier) in mind:
To produce therapeutic proteins inside a tobacco plant, genes for the desired antibodies are fused to genes for a natural tobacco virus. The tobacco plants are then infected with the artificial virus, producing the antibodies. The plants are then ground up and the antibodies extracted.
The Seattle-based Gates Foundation said yesterday its $150,000 grant would look at the possibility of using Chinese hamster ovary cells, similar to how many other complex biotechnology drugs are made, Callahan said. While the technique “offers a slower route than plant production, the infrastructure for manufacturing in CHO cells is well established, which means that production can be scaled up rapidly,” he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-10/new-method-sought-to-make-ebola-drug-grown-from-tobacco.html
What is NOT mentioned in the method Bill Gates has in mind is, that not only does this involve genetic modification, it also involves growing these CHO cells in medium and the harvest is cumbersome. Also, unlike the famous HeLa cells, CHO cells have a finite number of times to replicate before they die.
Whilst the first method (using the tobacco plant) is far cheaper and therefore a vaccine for Ebola would be affordable for countries in e.g. West Africa, the second method produces a much more expensive vaccine which will not find many customers in e.g. West Africa.
Bill Gates and Bloomberg have proven to be really good in making money, yet both appear to lack REAL empathy with human beings. Had either of them (Bill Gates/Bloomberg) donated a “measly” $150 000 to the people of MSF, the BBC would announce this in a 10 minute long ‘report’ in the news.
Grrrrrr… that darn bracket again…
Fixed?
Reminds me of a story about Gates I came across yesterday:
Bill Gates, one of the world’s most notable (or notorious) billionaires is at it again, announcing a remote controlled implantable birth control chip that could last up to 16 years.
The idea sprouted after a visit Bill made to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) two years prior, where he asked professor Robert Langer if there was any way to turn birth control on and off via remote control. This would spare women the trouble of visiting the clinic to have contraceptive implants removed when they wanted to become pregnant
To me it seemed that Gates wasn’t interested in “sparing women the trouble” of doing anything, but taking external control of their fertility.
Fixed. Thanks!
Yes, Bill Gates…
The remainder of Bill’s fortune will be left to his charity, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on poor health and poverty.
Bill and Melinda Gates’ children:
However, it was reported in 2011 that Bill’s children are set to inherit a measly $10 million each. When asked about it, Bill explained his decision at the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada on March 18.
“They won’t have anything like that. They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important,” Bill said. “You’ve got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they’re going to go and do.”
That sounds a little worrying; a parent who does NOT ensure his offspring has everything he worked for once his number comes up? I most certainly do ensure that my offspring will have EVERYTHING – it was my (and their father’s) job to ensure that they “have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important” when they were growing up!
He seems far more occupied with the idea of receiving some sort of tobacco control sainthood post mortem when no more questions can be asked??
IF he really cared about people he would be repulsed by the WHO attending lavish, SECRET, conferences in Moskow whilst people in Afrika are dying of Ebola and the few organisations that mans the place are running out of EVERY basic resource needed.
What did Dr. Chan say? Ah, donors DETERMINE HOW the money is spent – all is going to fictional, comfortably 100% success “fighting” rate producing, NON-EXISTENT diseases whilst REAL PEOPLE continue to die – and the WHO has taken control of the media.
Knockout info or is it ammo? — that WHO is the private property of Bloomberg, Gates and Pharma. I’m merely surprised that I’m surprised at the extent to which we live in an oligarchy, or is it an autocracy.
On the local Ebola front: are you aware that the doctor, either out of arrogance (what? A doctor arrogant?) or total denial, not only didn’t quarantine himself but went gadding around town — riding subways and cabs, bowling, sightseeing, dining out and even went to a public park from which smokers, of course, are banned because they’re perils to Public Health. Local pols (govs of NY, NJ) went out of their way to entirely ignore his week’s worth of rambling, and kept assuring the city that he’d posed no danger, then immediately turned around, the next day, and imposed a mandatory 21 day quarantine on anyone landing here from Ebola- drenched countries, saying the Feds weren’t doing enough in that respect and that vital but voluntary quarantines clearly didn’t work. Watching the 180’s around here is like watching a tennis match. No — faster: a Ping-pong game. And then it just happened that very afternoon that another such doctor landed at the Newark ( NJ) airport, seemingly well by CDC standards, was nonetheless hauled into quarantine at a hospital, and apparently that night was suddenly feverish and said to have Ebola. But, hey, she arrived on a smoke-free flight so no harm could possibly come to the other flyers.
In fact I was aware of the bowling and the subways and the restaurants. You missed out his 3 mile jog, though. It’s actually rather amazing how much he managed to pack into the few days after he got back.
And these doctors are so privileged. And so amazingly lucky. They spend months in Liberia, and then fly back to the USA just before the symptoms appear. And then they get Zmapp shots or antibody infusions, and quickly recover (although not before giving a few of their co-workers a dose).
Before Bloomberg and Gates, there was CNN founder and Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner.
“Ted Turner’s United Nations Foundation: Making the UN a Pawn for Tax-Exempt Special Interests,” by Cliff Kincaid. Capital Research Center Foundation Watch, Mar 1999. Supposedly, the United Nations is strictly forbidden by its charter from accepting donations that are not from member countries. At least, that’s why they said they couldn’t accept Ted Turner’s money to pay the US’s dues. But UN Secretary General Kofi Annan happily bent the rules to accept Turner’s money for anti-smoking purposes. He created a special “Fund for International Partnerships,” reporting directly to himself, to funnel the money. “For example, a 1998 grant made jointly to WHO and UNICEF supports their efforts to promote ‘long-term strategies’ to ensure ‘tobacco-free children and youth.’ No doubt the US tobacco control movement is going global. Once again, children are the excuse for new taxes and regulations on the tobacco industry. The UN Foundation claims ‘this project is the single largest grant ever made to prevent and discourage international tobacco use among children and adolescents.” Best of all, the 10 annual installments of $100 million in Time-Warner stocks will probably save his heirs $100 million in estate taxes.
Click to access Foundation%20Watch%20March%201999.pdf
http://europe.cnn.com/us/9709/18/turner.gift/index.html
Philip Morris memo regarding former CNN anchorperson Gwenn Scott and Ted Turner’s 1987 smoking ban at CNN. “During discussions to renew her contract, Turner demanded that she either give up smoking or leave the network. Since she was unwilling to comply with the smoking directive, she is now seeking other employment. According to Ms. Scott, Turner’s anti-smoking policy is used to discriminate against certain employees while others are allowed to smoke freely… She went on to mention that it is common knowledge that Turner sits in his office and smokes marijuana and that the reason he decided to ‘crackdown’ on smoking is due to the demands of his current girlfriend” [Jane Fonda]. (Alan R. Miller to Guy L. Smith. Philip Morris USA, Interoffice Memo, Jul. 17, 1987.)
http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2024271877.html
From capitalresearch.org
Moreover the [$1 billion] donation will be made not to the UN directly, but to Turner’s private UN Foundation. The foundation is tax-exempt under US law, and has no legal affiliation with the UN…
Annan has created his own bureaucracy to manage the money…
The agreement offers no clues about the UN’s justification for accepting private foundation funds, which is a violation of the UN Charter.
So basically they set up some elaborate mechanisms – e.g. UNFIP – to feed $1 billion to the UN at $100 million a year. From the 2008 donor list, UNFIP had already given $92 million, against Bill Gates’ $45 million, and Michael Bloomberg’s $4.5 million. And the EU gave $83 million
But if the UN was going to get $100 million a year from Turner,, how come they’d only got $92 million by 2008? Perhaps there were other mechanisms.
And this is all money that is in addition to the punitive taxation on tobacco, and the MSA, and RWJF monies. It has to be no wonder at all if Tobacco Control went into overdrive in the late 1990s, and remains in overdrive. The $1 million blown in Moscow a week back was peanuts to these people. How come they only had two kinds of caviare?
And maybe it’s the same money that’s driving the Global Warming scam
When King asked about global warming, Turner said, “Haven’t you been outside lately? It’s hotter than hell out there.”
And maybe it’s the same money that’s driving the Global Warming scam
When King asked about global warming, Turner said, “Haven’t you been outside lately? It’s hotter than hell out there.”
It really took me some time to decide; I LOVE nature and I (following subconsciously the plea: OUR CHIIIILDREN’S FUTURE) needed to spend some time reading and thinking. I did a lot of the latter as my reading went on.
Global warming is a scam. It’s a waste of resources that would be better invested in adapting to what our planet does NATURALLY.
Scaremongering dictates our lives these days.
On Bloomberg.
“The Bloomberg Initiative works through a global network of partners to support countries implementing comprehensive tobacco control policies. Our partner organizations include: the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the CDC Foundation, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, the World Health Organization, and the World Lung Foundation. The Bloomberg Initiative also includes an investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
http://www.bloomberg.org/program/public-health/tobacco-control/#overview
And, so their name isn’t directly involved, the super-rich syphon money into things like the Gates Foundation that does with it as instructed by the donor. In this case it’s $2 BILLION in shares, just like that in 2013, Warren Buffett to Bill and Mel. And he does this every year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-08/buffett-makes-2-billion-donation-to-gates-foundation.html
Seems the US tax system’s not doing anyone any favours. Tax the poor, exempt the rich – and this is what happens! They get to run the world through proxies!
The choice of the word “investment” rather than “donation” is curiously revealing here. According to Google, “Philanthropy” is defined as “1.) the desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes. 2.) a philanthropic institution; a charity.” Whereas “investment” is defined as “the action or process of investing money for profit or material result.” Hence, an investment implies the expectation of some kind of material return. This creates a stark contradiction, and implies that the Bloomberg initiative’s ultimate goal is profit, not the improvement of public health.
Smoking Scot you have to be the right kind of rich to get away with no taxes………….The rest of the rich pay for those politically connected…………Then they screw all the working stiffs on everything. Obama has thru regulatory tax increases increased the fedral revenues by billlions but its the poor who are paying it not the rich……..
Cell phone tax increases via FCC on everything from your phone to internet to the dish antenna. Then all his green taxes and fees charged to carbon users to make electricity that gets passed right onto the rest of us………….Theres literally thousands of these lil hidden taxes and fees they increase whenever they want to……………
Piece about the WHO at Tobacco conference in the Daily Mail, with comments.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2808294/Champagne-caviar-salmon-carpaccio-talk-Ebola-World-Health-Organisation-spent-1million-lavish-conference-hosted-Putin-number-infections-passed-10-000.html.
The World Health Organisation spent £1 million on a tobacco conference hosted by Vladimir Putin, while having to beg to secure funding to battle Ebola, it has been revealed today.
Funny that it’s only been revealed today. I’ve known about it for months.
Although I must say I didn’t know about “two types of caviar and three salmon dishes”. Was that all in one evening? And was it all washed down with Stolichnaya and Cuban cigars? No, they wouldn’t do that, would they?
It looks like the MSM is beginning to cotton on. Better late than never. Forbes:
The sovereignty of individual nations is increasingly under threat from international governance bodies that want to force a range of new regional and international taxes on states. The latest attempt to bypass state sovereignty occurred when the World Health Organization (WHO) met behind closed doors in Moscow last week. In fact, even independent media outlets were excluded from the meeting.
Washington Times:
The world, or a good part of it, struggles to cope with Ebola, and the United Nations continues to be obsessed by tobacco. The World Health Organization, meeting in Moscow, came up with a treaty imposing a global tax on cigarettes and delegates of 179 nations signed it.
Washington Post:
The virus easily outran the plodding response. The WHO, an arm of the United Nations, is responsible for coordinating international action in a crisis like this, but it has suffered budget cuts, has lost many of its brightest minds and was slow to sound a global alarm on Ebola. Not until Aug. 8, 4 1 ⁄ 2 months into the epidemic, did the organization declare a global emergency. Its Africa office, which oversees the region, initially did not welcome a robust role by the CDC in the response to the outbreak.
Businesswire:
AHF on Ebola: World Must Rethink Role of World Health Organization
I think it was maybe a bad move to exclude the media from their Moscow bash.
‘I think it was maybe a bad move to exclude the media from their Moscow bash.’
Their arrogance knows no bounds, which is now starting to become a ‘good’ thing – lose the leading outlet for their lies and propaganda used to sway public opinion and it’ll be game over.
Funny that it’s only been revealed today. I’ve known about it for months.
As did this fellow in the comments to that extremely prescient post.
And I couldn’t agree more with his assertion that Tom Frieden is a certified Pencil Neck Geek. If there’s one thing that stands out from all of the media face time he’s been getting as of late, it’s that.
Do be sure and click on his last link. It’s not often you get a second chance to turn the world on to the mellifluous euphony and subtle, eloquent lyrics of the one and only Fredrick Blassie.
@ Sheldon
Another in a similar vein at the The Express.
Seems an MP is rather miffed that we sent two “dignitaries” from the DoH. I’m miffed he should consider Mr. Black as anything other than a toxic zit. (And he overlooked her ladyship – Debs of ASH – whom we paid for as well, as an “observer”. In Korea in 2012 Debs was able to swing it so she went armed with spouse – no concrete info on 2014… yet).
But it’ll be back to business as usual in 2016, for whom amongst the TC lot wouldn’t want to savour the culinary delights on offer in New Delhi? (DoH sent five to Korea).
http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/527493/Fury-after-WHO-1-6million-party-Ebola-crisis
(Absolutely no positive comments, but it is a Sunday and paid trolls ain’t worth the overtime).
Frank, do you by chance remember that old frequent commenter from the bygone LiveJournal days by the name of ‘iessalb’? Did you ever think to yourself, ‘Gawd, what an odd name’? Moldavian perhaps?
Well, it can now be revealed that it was an ananym of ‘blassie’. I screwed up the first two letters obviously. I’m not even skilled at ananyms apparently.
Report From Greece. Guest post from Nisakiman.
Blimey, SV, I’d forgotten all about that post. I just re-read it, and the situation hasn’t changed very much at all in the three years since I wrote it. I still sit at the bar in my local café with an ashtray in front of me; my favourite restaurant still brings an ashtray to the post-prandial table, and the head honcho in the main area post office still has a fag permanently burning in the ashtray on his desk. And people still don’t wear helmets when they ride their bikes / scooters.
Thank the Gods for the Greeks. I can’t imagine living in another country, with all those restrictions. Can’t go out for a beer and a ciggy? WTF? Utter μαλακίες (roughly translated means ‘bullshit’).
Ebola has now reached Mali.
Mali’s health minister says the West African country has confirmed its first case of Ebola.
and
Worse still, the baby girl in Mali is reported to have been bleeding from her nose while she traveled from Guinea on a bus that stopped in several towns in Mali. WHO is now warning that a large number of people may have been exposed to the girl while she was infectious.
Sadly, the little girl (aged 2) died yesterday from the disease. The BBC spent 10 seconds on that.
The WHO must be a pretty useless organisation; in Liberia, Guinea and now Malta, chiiildren actually DIE. And what does the WHO do? It whimpers for more MONEY (their sponsors are sacred; they specify their donations to go for life style (fictional) deaths, so sod the Africans?
In a 10 second slot the WHO whimpered something about their failure and instantly pointed their fingers at EVERYONE ELSE. Just as Prof. Grieshaber said it would do.
Even when it comes to vaccines the WHO (especially it’s sponsor, Bill Gates) is dictating to try and get the most expensive vaccine research going rather than using the tobacco plant (a COUSIN of the tobacco plant we use for enjoyment!) and get the vaccine to the affected areas ASAP.
The hatred towards tobacco cost REAL lives.
This may not be about the smoking bans, per-se, or how the media piles in and conforms to the anti-smoking propaganda exactly, but in the idea of “follow the money”, this story does reveal the truth, that in the US, the ideas are pre-conceived, upfront, by a few people high in media authority, ideology and “truth” is conformed to promote the paid advertisers, including Big Pharma who is of course one of the key sponsors who pay for the anti-smoking-hate-industry to exist and to coincide with the political operatives promoting the same “truths” simultaneously. It is the story of how and why media propaganda supports the anti-smoker-hate-industry, as much as it is about anything else.
It’s a very good explanation and revelation of what “follow the money” will lead one to – and it’s to a major corruption across all lines of “truth” and how a major propaganda machine is in operation that is truly in support of the anti-smoker-hate-industry, among everything else it churns out in mass quantities via its falsehood propaganda machines.
http://nypost.com/2014/10/25/former-cbs-reporter-explains-how-the-liberal-media-protects-obama/
And if they can protect the DC political establishment and surround it with lies, they can protect the drug companies and the anti-smoker-hate-industry, who are now the “paid sponsors” since tobacco advertising has become illegal while prescription pharmaceutical advertising has been legalized (funny how that worked, like a see-saw, as if pre-planned in the back rooms somewhere all along) and replaced it.
One can see how that part of the propaganda machine works, in general and in theory, how the money calls the shots and the corruption finally becomes total.
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