“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 meeting that were provided to us. It is heard on an audio recording of the session, one of several recordings passed on to us by a whistleblower. The minutes were provided only following a Freedom of Information request and subsequent litigation.
The episode is serious in its own right. But it goes far beyond a local episode of personal conflict of interest or an administrative failure within Israel’s health system. The materials point to something more consequential: the use of an international emergency authorization pathway to shape regulatory decisions inside a sovereign state, advanced through overlapping professional networks, without the organization assuming the legal responsibilities borne by national regulators.
Hellbound and Down 