Gulf Insider
“I need to ask someone else to take responsibility for the second part of the approvals process, so that I won’t have a conflict of interest. I’m also working with Bill Gates and the World Health Organization on the vaccine itself.” This admission of a conflict of interest was made by Prof. Lester Schulman, secretary of the Ministry of Health’s polio committee, in March 2023, during an internal discussion about approving the importation into Israel of a new polio vaccine. The vaccine was developed and promoted by the World Health Organization in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and its approval pathway relied on a new emergency authorization mechanism the WHO has developed in recent years: the EUL (Emergency Use Listing). Although the remark was framed as a technical aside, it was an unusual confession of a conflict of interest by the committee’s secretary. Its seriousness is compounded by the fact that it was made only after the committee had already voted by an overwhelming majority to initiate the process of bringing the vaccine to Israel, and after it had already worked vigorously to persuade the Pharmaceutical Division to cooperate. The quotation does not appear in the official minutes of the […]
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