Covid insider Farrar at the helm of a ‘modern eugenics’ agenda
ON December 13, 2022, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced that Sir Jeremy Farrar, the current director of the Wellcome Trust, would be joining as its Chief Scientist. In a few weeks, Farrar will take the helm of its science division, which ‘harnesses the power of science and innovation’, providing ‘global leadership in leveraging the best scientific evidence to improve health and promote health equity for all’.
The science division’s creation in 2019 was a part of the WHO’s ‘transformation’. It is, it says, ‘instrumental in making WHO the trusted source of the best scientific evidence about Covid-19, its treatment and prevention’, playing, it says, a ‘key role in countering the infodemic of misinformation’.
So what’s it really up to?
In July 2022, the WHO Science Council, which was set up by the outgoing chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, published its first report. Its first priority is to accelerate access to genomics for global health, arguing that it ‘is not justifiable ethically or scientifically for less-resourced countries to gain access to such technologies long after rich countries do’. This is the same argument that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, makes to open up markets for new vaccines in low- and middle-income countries and which was used as a justification for the creation of the COVAX loan facility to help such countries pay for Covid vaccines.
In retrospect, it’s perhaps no surprise. Farrar is a strategic adviser to the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. It was set up in 2013 and ‘aims to accelerate progress in genomic research and human health by cultivating a common framework of standards and harmonized approaches for effective and responsible genomic and health-related data sharing’.
In 2020 the Wellcome Trust, which Farrar heads, was ahead of the game. In May, a few weeks after the UK Covid vaccine taskforce was launched, Wellcome announced it was creating a US-based ‘advanced research non-profit’ organization called Wellcome Leap to ‘accelerate innovations in global health’.
Regina Dugan, former head of DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (who subsequently worked at Google and Facebook) was hired as its chief executive, promising to bring with her DARPA’s approach of putting together a ‘Special Forces’ team of diverse capabilities.