Bill Gates has poured lots of money into the University of Washington and its Global Health department and its Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).  Global Health and IHME share a new building provided them by BMGF, away from the campus but close to BMGF headquarters. Four years ago, BMGF gave them $489 million dollars, after founding the Global Health department ten years earlier. And why not?  He gets to control the world’s public health narratives with that money. And, apparently, much of the University of Washington as well:

“Through a generous gift and endowment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and complementary Washington State resources, the UW Department of Global Health was established in 2007, bridging the schools of Medicine and Public Health, with a mandate to harness the expertise and interdisciplinary power of all 16 UW schools and colleges.” 

The Merriam Webster dictionary says a mandate is:

1. : an authoritative command
especially : a formal order from a superior court or official to an inferior one
2. : an authorization to act given to a representative 

You might want to read more about the IHME’s frauds and its close relationship to Bill Gates.  Journalist Tim Schwab did a wonderful expose on the IHME in December, in The Nation. Its subtile is:

Thanks to the Microsoft founder’s support, the IHME can make its own rules about how to track global health. That’s a problem.