In March of 1984, at conference sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation and held at the Bellagio Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, where 34 world health leaders met The Task Force for Child Survival and Development (TFCSD) was formed, founded by Dr. Bill Foege. [1].
They agreed:
To a plan not only to immunize all the world’s children as an impetus to primary health care, but also to promote other effective means–ranging from oral rehydration to child spacing and family planning–where and when opportunities present themselves, so as to reduce morbidity and mortality in this most vulnerable of all groups.
In ~November 2004, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CDC and Rockefeller Foundation the Task Force began research on coalitions and collaborations in Global Health. [8] Following the publication of the book, Real Collaboration: What it Takes for Global Health to Succeed, authored by Task Force President and CEO Mark Rosenberg et al [3, 7] the organisation had morphed, to now target every person on the planet and became The Task Force for Global Health, a nonprofit, public health organization, recognized as a 501(c)(3) corporation, based in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, plus a non-profit subsidiary called Global Health Solutions (GHS). [4, 5, 6]
In 1991 the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) through grant money set up the All Kids Count program to “develop immunization registries, then the Task Forced got involved with the program to forge “new alliances between the public and private health care sectors.” [8, 9] In 2002 it morphed into the Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII). RWJF is a philanthropist orgainsation heavily involved in electronic health tracking and “evidenced based medicine”.
In October 1987, the Mectizan® Donation Program was announced where Merck & Co., Inc., the discoverer of Mectizan® (ivermectin, M.D.), a “very safe” drug, donated the drug, without cost, for the treatment of Onchocerciasis (river blindness) for as long as was needed, this act ushered in the era known as “pharmacophilanthropy”. [2]