The GAVI replenishment & toxic tweets

Lately I got annoyed by a tweet Seth Berkley (CEO GAVI) sent, “Thank you @BorisJohnson, @BillGates and @melindagates for sharing your “commitment to the vital work of @Gavi and … the upcoming UK-hosted Global Vaccine Summit on June 4." I truly appreciate your commitment to the Alliance and global health security. https://bit.ly/2XgSgx5 “

It wasn’t the first time I got annoyed.  

No doubt I’m not the most unbiased person on earth when it comes to public-private partnerships, but at the same time, I have no problem whatsoever to admit that GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance is an important Global Public Good in the world “as it currently is”. So I very much hope its upcoming replenishment (4 June) will be a success, even if I’d like to see GPGs (like GAVI) to be financed in a different way, as I have explained elsewhere: by taxing the winners of globalization (and billionaires in particular), rather than through a “replenishment”.

So why do I get so annoyed then by these sorts of tweets? Well, frankly, I consider the ‘thank you, Bill’ tweets PPP CEOs’ sycophantic equivalent of dr. Tedros’ unfortunately still too common “thank you” tweets to authoritarian leaders (like Modi, Kagame, or say, the Belarus president). They are anything but smart, and in the current circumstances probably even toxic.

I notice on the GAVI governance web-page that they have one representative of civil society in their Board. Now that GAVI will, once again, be key in delivery of Covid-19 vaccines, (a vaccine (or even a few) will materialize, I bet, but not sure though to what extent it will be effective), I think it’s time to ponder greater involvement of social movements & civil society in the public-private partnership. Yes, to some extent, organisations like MSF Access play this role,  but given the ugly mood in many societies (and even uglier conspiracy theories on the likes of Gates et al), I think an organization like GAVI (and its CEO ) can no longer afford these sorts of sycophantic ‘thank you, Bill’ tweets. It smacks of Davos men & women ‘ruling the world among each other over high-level breakfasts’, and if I’m getting annoyed by them (PS: I guess I’m not the only one among global health observers, one of them called them – and I quote – a ‘freakin’ club’ ) then you can only imagine how tweets like this go down the antivaxxers crowd. And let’s face it, with a future Covid-19 vaccine probably at least a bit ‘controversial’ (in terms of impact, side effects, …), you want to be as transparent and democratic as possible.

Time to do something about it, Seth. And about greater involvement of civil society and social movements in general in GAVI. Twenty years after its launch at the World Economic forum in Davos, GAVI The Vaccine Alliance still comes across as a largely elite-led global public good. Time for a change.