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Why Do Friends of Freedom Dread the World Economic Forum?

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From the Brownstone Institute

BY James BovardJAMES BOVARD

Last week, Elon Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter. She has excellent political connections. In 2021, she partnered with the Biden administration to create a Covid-19 vaccination campaign. Free speech activists howled over Yaccarinoā€™s appointment as Twitter boss because she is an Executive Chair with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Hereā€™s the story on WEF, sparked by their most recent annual meeting.

The January meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, should have set off alarms among freedom lovers around the globe. The annual confab of billionaires, political weasels, and deranged activists laid out plans to further repress humanity. But at least the gathering provided plenty of comic relief for people who enjoy elite buffoonery.

Self-worship is obligatory in Davos. John Kerry, Bidenā€™s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, hailed his fellow attendees as ā€œextraterrestrialā€ for their devotion to saving the earth. Greenpeace complained that ā€œthe rich and powerful flock to Davos in ultra-polluting, socially inequitable private jets to discuss climate and inequality behind closed doors.ā€ Being a climate change activist is ā€œthe privilege of rich and elite folksā€ who want to force people to use unreliable and ineffective wind and solar for energy, according to Daniel Turner of Power the Future.

People around the globe are still recovering from the last time WEF stampeded policymakers. ā€œWEF was hugely influential, championing every form of COVID control from lockdowns to vaccine mandates. The WEF cares nothing for normal people living real lives. They are forging a Faucian nightmare,ā€ warned Jeffrey Tucker, president of Brownstone Institute. China had one of the most brutal and dishonest COVID lockdowns in the world (aside from perhaps fabricating the COVID virus in one of its own laboratories). But WEF founder Klaus Schwab touted Chinaā€™s COVID crackdown as a ā€œrole modelā€ and ā€œa very attractive model for quite a number of countries.ā€

WEF is whooping up the ā€œGreat Resetā€ ā€” ā€œbuilding back betterā€ so that economies can emerge greener and fairer out of the pandemic. The Great Reset presumes that practically every nation has benevolent dictators waiting to take the reins over peopleā€™s lives. American entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy wrote, ā€œThe Great Reset calls for dissolving the boundaries between the public & private sectors; between nations; between the online & offline worlds, and the will of individual citizens be damned.ā€ Billionaire Elon Musk, who was not invited, scoffed, ā€œWEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and donā€™t want.ā€ Musk ridiculed the WEFā€™s ā€œMaster the Futureā€ slogan: ā€œAre they trying to be the boss of Earth!?ā€

Sounds good to WEF attendees.

Freedom of speech is the greatest barrier to inflicting the Great Reset. Law professor Jonathan Turley observed, ā€œDavos has long been the Legion of Doom for free speech.ā€ Accordingly, the biggest peril the self-proclaimed ā€œGlobal Shapersā€ are targeting is ā€œThe Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation.ā€

The WEF searched long and hard to find an eminent disinformation panel host to incarnate Davos values. They selected Brian Stelter, a former anchor who was too squirrely even for CNN. After CNN ejected Stelter, he was snapped up by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to be their Media and Democracy Fellow.

The star of the panel was New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who proclaimed that disinformation is the ā€œmost existentialā€ of every other major challenge that we are grappling with as a society.ā€ Like most of the windy speakers in Switzerland, Sulzberger tormented the audience from the high ground:

Disinformation and in the broader set of misinformation, conspiracy, propaganda, clickbait, you know, the broader mix of bad information thatā€™s corrupting the information ecosystem, what it attacks is trust. And once you see trust decline, what you then see is a society start to fracture, and so you see people fracture along tribal lines and, you know, that immediately undermines pluralism.

Sulzberger boasted, ā€œWhen we make mistakes, we acknowledge them in public and we correct them.ā€ Except for RussiaGate, its 1619 Project fairy tale, the January 6 Capitol clash, and a few dozen other howlers. The New York Times effectively refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election, giving an unearned boost to Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Sulzberger talked about the decline of trust as if it were the result of a leaking underground storage tank tainting the ā€œinformation ecosystem.ā€ But it was the media that poisoned the well upon which they depend. A 2021 survey by the Reuters Institute reported that only 29 percent of Americans trusted the news media ā€” the lowest rating of any of the 46 nations surveyed. A Gallup poll revealed that ā€œ86 percent of Americans believed the media was politically biased.ā€ Practically the only folks who donā€™t recognize the bias are the people who share the mediaā€™s slant.

Serendipitously, the WEF also had a panel on ā€œDisrupting Distrust.ā€ The panel opened with a report grimly revealing that trust in government has declined in nations across the world. Maybe the profound, pointless disruptions from the COVID lockdowns that ravaged many countries were part of the blame? That panel was hosted by New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Her paper recently ran an opinion piece which claimed that there had been ā€œno lockdownsā€ for COVID in this country. All of the closed schools and shuttered small businesses were an optical illusion, apparently.

The Davos pro-censorship fervor was epitomized by panelist Věra JourovĆ”, European Commission vice president. She declared that the United States ā€œwill have soonā€ laws prohibiting ā€œillegal hate speech,ā€ like Europe has. JourovĆ” previously urged expanding hate crime laws to ban ā€œsexual exploitation of women.ā€ Would possession of a 1957 Playboy centerfold be sufficient for a criminal conviction? Nude beaches are common in Europe. Would the European Commission backstop online prohibitions by deploying commissars on every beach to make sure no male had improper thoughts about the birthday suits he saw?

Hate-speech laws are a Pandoraā€™s box because the speech politicians hate the most is criticism of government. And some knuckleheads on Capitol Hill believe that the United States already has hate-speech laws. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) recently declared, ā€œIf you espouse hate, if you espouse violence, youā€™re not protected under the First Amendment. I think we can be more aggressive in the way that we handle that type of use of the internet.ā€ Whatā€™s next ā€” a federal Cordiality Czar with the prerogative to purify every tweet?

Disinformation panelist Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) blamed ā€œmisinformationā€ for not being able to ā€œget people to take a COVID vaccine.ā€ But the false claims by Biden and top officials that vaxxes prevent infection and transmission werenā€™t misinformation ā€” they were just typos.

Davos attendees ignored the stunning disclosures of US government censorship that occurred shortly before their private jets arrived in Switzerland. The #Twitterfiles recently revealed that federal officials pressured Twitter to suppress 250,000 Twitter users (including journalists). But according to WEF scoring, that wasnā€™t an outrage ā€” instead, it was a tiny down payment for a Higher Truth. WEF ignored that the FBI was already suppressing free speech the same way that WEF panelists championed.

As journalist Matt Taibbi revealed, ā€œAs the election approached in 2020, the FBI overwhelmed Twitter with requests, sending spreadsheets with hundreds of accountsā€ to target and suppress. The official browbeating continued until very recently. In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBIā€™s National Election Command Post sent the FBI San Francisco field office (which dealt directly with Twitter) ā€œa long list of accounts that ā€˜may warrant additional actionā€™ā€ ā€” that is, suppression.

The FBI pressured Twitter to torpedo parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, ā€œThe master-canine quality of the FBIā€™s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ā€˜FBI San Francisco is notifying youā€™ it wants action on four accounts.ā€

The WEF is calling for a ā€œGlobal Framework To Regulate Harm Onlineā€ ā€” that is, worldwide censorship. One of the WEFā€™s favorite stars ā€” a certified WEF Young Global Leader ā€” was unable to attend because she was having a meltdown that ended with her resignation. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became a progressive hero for making ever screechier demands for world censorship, comparing free speech to ā€œweapons of war.ā€ She told the United Nations last September: ā€œWe have the means; we just need the collective willā€ to suppress ideas that officialdom disapproves. Journalist Glenn Greenwald derided Ardernā€™s pitch as ā€œthe face of authoritarianism ā€¦ and the mindset of tyrants everywhere.ā€ But Ardern was there in spirit even if she was overwhelmed at home.

The WEF offers one of the best illustrations of how denunciations of ā€œdisinformationā€ are self-serving shams. In 2016, WEF put out a video with eight predictions for life in 2030. The highlight of the film was a vapid Millennial guy pictured alongside the slogan: ā€œYou will own nothing and be happy.ā€ The slogan was inspired by an essay the WEF published from Danish Member of Parliament Ida Auken: ā€œWelcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy and life has never been better.ā€ But the antiā€“private property bias is no WEF aberration. Last July, the WEF proposed slashing ownership of private vehicles around the globe. And then there was the WEF pitch to save the planet by having people eat insects instead of red meat. (The chairman of German manufacturer Siemens achieved heroic status at Davos by calling for a billion people to stop eating meat to save the planet.)

But according to WEF managing director Adrian Monck, the WEF has been the victim of a horrible conspiracy theory sparked by the ā€œown nothingā€ phrase. Monck absolved WEF because the phrase in the video came from ā€œan essay series intended to spark debate about socio-economic developments.ā€ Monck claimed the phrase ā€œstarted life as a screenshot, culled from the Internet by an anonymous anti-semitic account on the image board 4chan.ā€ Bigots or zealots on 4chan howled in protest about that phrase. But as Elon Musk quipped, ā€œWould be great if someone could compile a game contest of who said the craziest stuff between 4chan and WEF! My money is on the latter.ā€

At least the WEF has not (yet) proposed mandatory injections to compel propertyless underlinings to be happy. Or maybe the WEF would just recommend covertly adding drugs to the water supply.

Major media outlets were either participants or cosponsors of the WEF. Former New York Times editor-in-chief Jill Abramson slammed the Times for being part of the Davos ā€œcorrupt circle-jerk.ā€ While the event was portrayed as a chance for sharing ideas, it was instead little more than a chance to hobnob with fellow elitists. Author Walter Kirn noted that there is almost no disagreement among WEF attendees: ā€œThe largest matters on earth are at stake (supposedly) yet the conferees donā€™t argue. They donā€™t debate. All points seem smugly settled. Itā€™s an ego orgy.ā€ The hypocrisy was beyond hip-deep. Journalist Michael Shellenberger noted, ā€œWEF doesnā€™t engage in even the minimal amount of transparency through public disclosure that it constantly preaches to corporations and philanthropies.ā€

What could possibly go wrong from turning common people around the world into serfs of their elitist overlords? According to WEF, individual freedom is a luxury that citizens ā€” or at least their rulers ā€” can no longer afford. But the benevolence of dictators is almost always an illusion created by their fawning supporters. And this yearā€™s WEF gathering proved again that there will never be a shortage of media and intellectual bootlickers for tyranny.

A version of this article was originally published in the April 2023 edition of Future of Freedom.

Author

  • James Bovard

    James Bovard, 2023 Brownstone Fellow, is author and lecturer whose commentary targets examples of waste, failures, corruption, cronyism and abuses of power in government. He is a USA Today columnist and is a frequent contributor to The Hill. He is the author of ten books.

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Brownstone Institute

If the President in the White House can’t make changes, who’s in charge?

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From the Brownstone Institute

ByĀ Jeffrey A TuckerJeffrey A. TuckerĀ 

Who Controls the Administrative State?

President Trump on March 20, 2025,Ā orderedĀ the following: ā€œThe Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.ā€

That is interesting language: to ā€œtake all necessary steps to facilitate the closureā€ is not the same as closing it. And what is ā€œpermitted by lawā€ is precisely what is in dispute.

It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trumpā€™s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.

The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.

How this is decided ā€“Ā whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden ā€“Ā affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.

All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.

The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weberā€™s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable ā€œiron cageā€ built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.

Todayā€™s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesnā€™t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.

This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the ā€œdeep stateā€ ā€“ Iā€™veĀ arguedĀ there are deep, middle, and shallow layers ā€“Ā has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.

The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.

The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.

The combination of this series of outrages ā€“Ā what Jefferson in his Declaration called ā€œa long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Objectā€ ā€“Ā has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.

A distinguishing mark of Trumpā€™s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.

There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trumpā€™s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.

Even the signature early achievement of DOGE ā€“ the shuttering of USAID ā€“Ā has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.

Not a day goes by when theĀ New York TimesĀ does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.

After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called ā€œthe news.ā€ Where would theĀ NYTĀ or the whole legacy media otherwise be?

So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being ā€œlost in spaceā€ has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the ā€œnew thingā€ for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.

What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) ā€“Ā far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class ā€“Ā is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.

We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.

All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US governmentĀ organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: ā€œThe executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.ā€

Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. Itā€™s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive isā€¦the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do ā€“Ā we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.

What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.

For an agency to be deemed ā€œindependentā€ turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.

Thatā€™s what ā€œindependenceā€ means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.

That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.

There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.

First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump wonā€™t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trumpā€™s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.

That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trumpā€™s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.

Second, one worries about the return of the ā€œspoils system,ā€ the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.

In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.

Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?

Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.

Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.

If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.

The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?

Trumpā€™s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.

Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.

Author

Jeffrey A Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, includingĀ Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Brownstone Institute

The New Enthusiasm for Slaughter

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From the Brownstone Institute

ByĀ David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute David BellĀ Ā 

What War Means

My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known ā€“ probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft ā€“ other bombers of his squadron off north Australia ā€“ and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.

Early in the movieĀ Saving Private Ryan,Ā there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets.Ā It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.

It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.

People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.

Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.

I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.

The EU Reverses Its Focus

When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EUā€™s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.

Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.

We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.

In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow ā€œfar right.ā€

The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as ā€œpeace through strengthā€ are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.

As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?

Europeā€™s Need for Outside Help

A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.

Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ā€˜usā€™ from a ā€˜themā€™ā€¦While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.

Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each otherā€™s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.

Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Letā€™s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.

There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.

Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

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