This note provide additional context for those who are just now following the issue of conflicts of interest and the WHO Consultative Expert Working Group (CEWG) on R&D Financing.
The CEWG follows a controversial, flawed and failed effort by an earlier group, the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG) on R&D Financing, to:
At the end of the day on Monday, the 128 WHO Executive Board meeting took the agenda item for creation of a new R&D Financing consultative expert working group (CEWG). (Yesterday’s blog on this topic is here)
Today the WHO is expected to take up the Report by the Secretariat on “the Establishment of a consultative expert working group on research and development: financing and coordination.” (link here).
The following reports the number of Google hits using the search term “gates foundation,” with a site:domainname option, on January 7, 2011. The result is a count of the number of web pages (visible to Google) mentioning the Gates Foundation on a particular domain.
For example, the google search site:who.int “gates foundation” identified 5,940 pages on the who.int web site that have the exact phrase, “gates foundation.”