Who was behind the vaccine bonds?

In the last of these 14 profiles from The Single Global Mafia, we turn to the president of The Rockefeller Foundation itself, who acts as an ex-officio member of its board of trustees.

Rajiv Shah is best known for having been administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2010 to 2015, where he is said to have “elevated the role of development as part of our nation’s foreign policy”. [395]

In particular he is given credit for ensuring the passage of two significant laws – the Global Food Security Act and the Electrify Africa Act, of which we have already heard tell.

USAID pushes a worldwide programme of “long-term socioeconomic development”, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. [396]

Wikipedia places it in the long tradition of US so-called “foreign aid” schemes, such as the post-WW2 “Build Back Better” Marshall Plan and the WWI Commission for Relief in Belgium headed by Herbert Hoover. [397]

However, while the online encyclopedia claims the latter “prevented starvation in Belgium after the German invasion”, the truth is very different.

As historians Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty explain, it in fact amounted to “one of the world’s greatest con jobs” with Hoover being “a confidence trickster and a crook”. [398][399]

“The American-born mining engineer lived in London for years and was a business colleague of the Rothschilds,” they add.

“Financial muscle was never far from his center of power. The Morgan/Rothschild axis was wrapped around the entire project”. [400]

Today USAID continues that fine tradition of working with “financial muscle”, as it spells out on its website.

“USAID partners with the private sector where there is a strong alignment between business interests and our development objectives. Today, we find these two aims increasingly intersecting”. [401]

Or maybe it is just becoming increasingly obvious that they amount to the same thing?

In any case, Shah has played a key role in this corporatist “intersection”. His Rockefeller Foundation profile says that while at USAID he “reshaped the $20 billion agency’s operations in more than 70 countries around the world by elevating the role of innovation, creating high-impact public-private partnerships”. [402]

USAID says it is involved in “engaging with the private sector as strategic partners” in the areas of “food security”, “global health”, “climate change” and “energy”. [403]

It could have added “war” to that list.

As journalist Saheli Khastagir writes: “In the 2000s, while the US military was bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, USAID was tasked with ‘rebuilding’ the two countries.

“More than a month before Iraq was actually invaded by American troops, USAID began soliciting bids for rebuilding the country from a few ‘pre-qualified’ corporations”. [404]

An August 2024 article on the Bloomberg website notes that USAID is often accused of being a front for the CIA and “has faced its fair share of scandals over the years”.

It reveals that in Iraq, child labour was used by the recipient of a $9 million 2021 USAID grant to provide critical water, sanitation and hygiene services to 200,000 internally displaced persons.

And there were “multiple cases involving the sexual exploitation and abuse of children” at African charities that were awarded tens of millions of dollars in USAID contracts. [405]

Continuing the financial neo-colonialism theme, Shah is the founder of Latitude Capital, “a private equity firm focused on power and infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia”. [406]

In 2020 he was part of The Council for Inclusive Capitalism with the Vatican, “a historic new partnership between some of the world’s largest investment and business leaders and the Vatican”, headed by Lynn Forester de Rothschild. [407]

Shah sits on numerous boards including the International Rescue Committee, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Trilateral Commission and the Atlantic Council – he is also a member of the much-aforementioned Council on Foreign Relations. [408]

And in January 2024 he was appointed a Class C director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for a three-year term ending on December 31, 2026. [409]

In order to fully understand the context of all these roles – and indeed of his presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation – we need to look back to the early years of his career.

As a young man, in 2001, Shah went to work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he was responsible for developing the International Finance Facility for Immunization, which has raised more than $5 billion for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI). [410]

This basically uses government pledges to support the issuing of “Vaccine Bonds” sold to institutional and individual investors so as to ensure and accelerate funding for Big Pharma jabs. [411]

The origins of this device are fascinating. In the text of a 2018 speech, Arunma Oteh, then vice-president and treasurer of the World Bank, describes herself as “a pioneer board member of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), which was founded in 2006”. [412]

She sheds some interesting general light on the financial-imperialist development agenda that has been so visible throughout this essay.

Oteh says: “Global growth is going to come from emerging markets, which of course relies in part on development finance. From an investor’s perspective, emerging markets often offer high returns on a risk‑adjusted basis as well as opportunities for diversification.

“To foster growth, we need to connect investors to products that build human and physical capital. We need to fill infrastructure gaps and improve health and education outcomes. Like the previous speaker said, we need to increase female labour‑force participation.

“The UN estimates that of the $3.9 trillion needed annually for developing countries to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, only $2.5 trillion is being invested per year.

“This means we need to bridge this $1.4 trillion annual gap, and I believe we can do so by leveraging the capital markets to complement what public‑sector resources already do.

“Specifically, I believe we can mobilize more private‑sector resources. We can focus more on sustainability, as earlier speakers have alluded to. I think we need to continue to think about innovative financing solutions”. [413]

Oteh’s speech was addressed to the 50th general meeting and conference in Madrid of the International Capital Market Association, known as the ICMA, which played a key role in creating the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, IFFIm.

Explains a 2017 “Innovative Finance” update from IFFIm, GAVI the Vaccine Alliance and the World Bank: “The International Capital Market Association in 2017 issued guidelines for socially responsible investments.

“The result: ICMA’s Social Bond Principles (SBPs), which were recognized by GlobalCapital’s Sustainable and Responsible Capital Markets Awards this year as the Most Valuable Innovation for the Green/SRI Bond Market”.

It quotes René Karsenti, who is both IFFIm’s board chair and ICMA’s president, as describing ICMA’s latest work in this area as “a big and valuable step ahead for the field that IFFIm has been part of since 2006”. [414]

ICMA is set up as a “not-for-profit association” (Verein) under the Swiss Civil Code and headquartered in Zurich, with offices in London, Paris, Brussels and Hong Kong.

It explains on its website: “For over 50 years ICMA and its members have worked together to promote the development of the international capital and securities markets, pioneering the rules, principles and recommendations which have laid the foundations for their successful operation.

“ICMA currently has over 620 members active in all segments of international debt capital markets in 70 jurisdictions globally.

“Among our members are private and public sector issuers, banks and securities dealers, asset and fund managers, insurance companies, law firms, capital market infrastructure providers and central banks”. [415]

And who could possibly be behind such a massive and powerful global financial institution?

Oteh reveals in her speech: “ICMA started as an organisation of 19 bond dealers in NM Rothschild & Sons London office in 1968”. [416]

So there you have it.

That was hard work to put together (and possibly to read!) but I think it had to be done.

It is plain that the Rockefeller entity, as reflected by the profiles of its president and the trustees of its Foundation, is not in the least distinct from the Rothschilds’ empire.

It is part of it.

They are the same thing.

What is revealed by following the threads of the activities and affiliations of these 14 individuals is a single interlocked web of exploitation and control, implicated in the Zionist genocide in Palestine and intent on profiting from a vast wave of industrial neo-imperialism in Asia, Latin America and, in particular, Africa.

There is only one global mafia and here we have seen its ugly face all too clearly.

The only question that remains in my mind is what on earth the rest of us – the overwhelmingly vast majority of humankind, after all! – are going to do about this horrible reality.

[Audio version]

The above article is an extract from my new 100-page booklet, The Single Global Mafia: The Rockefeller Foundation’s multiple links to Zionism and military-industrial-financial neo-imperialism, which can be downloaded free here for reading, safekeeping and the widest possible sharing.

[395] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[396] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development
[397] Ibid.
[398] Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty, Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended WWI by Three-and-a-Half Years (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2018), p. 233.
[399] Macgregor and Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 204.
[400] Macgregor and Docherty, Prolonging the Agony, p. 204, p. 231.
[401] https://www.usaid.gov/partner-with-us/corporations
[402] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[403] https://www.usaid.gov/partner-with-us/corporations
[404] https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/03/aid-for-profit-the-dark-history-of-usaid
[405] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-08-23/usaid-records-detail-child-labor-abuse-and-social-media-threats
[406] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[407]
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-council-for-inclusive-capitalism-with-the-vatican-a-new-alliance-of-global-business-leaders-launches-today-301187931.html
[408] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajiv_Shah
[409] https://www.newyorkfed.org/newsevents/news/aboutthefed/2024/20240105a
[410] https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/profile/rajiv-shah/
[411] https://iffim.org/sites/default/files/library/publications/iffim-updates/iffim-update-12/IFFIm%20Update%2012.pdf
[412] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2018/06/01/leveraging-capital-markets-for-sustainable-development
[413] Ibid.
[414] https://iffim.org/sites/default/files/library/publications/iffim-updates/iffim-update-12/IFFIm%20Update%2012.pdf
[415] https://www.icmagroup.org/About-ICMA/
[416] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2018/06/01/leveraging-capital-markets-for-sustainable-development