(RED)RUM: Bono and a Kennedy-Shriver, The Global Health Fund, Merck who Brough Africa Ivermectin (and Maybe Something Else), and the Horror Show of Philanthrocapitalism
Helping with the Pandemic/Epidemic Responses They Probably Cooked Up in the Overlook Hotel Basement
Established in 2002, the Global Fund is focused on ending the world’s deadliest pandemics: HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.
Over the last 20 years, The Global Fund partnership has saved more than 59 million lives, investing more than $60B to support programs run by local experts in the world’s most vulnerable communities.
(RED)’s Global Fund grants support life-saving programs that empower health workers and provide testing, treatment, and care in places where injustice has enabled pandemics to thrive. In order to coordinate billions of dollars in over 100 countries, the Global Fund has built a comprehensive system of checks and balances to ensure transparency and accountability.
Founded by Bono & Bobby Shriver in 2006 to fight AIDS, (RED) partners with the world’s most iconic brands and people to create products and experiences that raise money, heat, and urgency for global health crises. Every action you take with (RED) makes a difference. It’s simple: Choose (RED). Save lives.
(RED) is a division of The ONE Campaign. Learn more at www.red.org.
For nearly 2 decades, (RED) has partnered with the world’s most innovative and iconic brands.
Mission
Preventable and treatable diseases are only preventable and treatable for some. (RED) works to end that injustice. Together with its partners, (RED) drives critical awareness for the AIDS fight and funds life-saving grants that empower health workers and provide testing, treatment, and care in places where injustice enables pandemics to thrive. The majority of (RED)-supported grants operate in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to more than two-thirds of the global HIV population. (RED) and the Global Fund work closely together to ensure the money is distributed effectively and transparently across (RED)’s portfolio of grants.
Bono and Bobby Shriver founded (RED) with one goal in mind: let's end AIDS. Leveraging their star power and activist instincts, they chose the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to launch this innovative organization that has gone on to engage some of the world's most iconic brands in the fight. The Global Fund identified Rwanda and Swaziland to become the first countries to receive (RED)-backed investment.
Over the last 10 years, Bobby Shriver has co-founded three organizations to help eliminate the financial and health emergencies threatening the people of Africa. Those organizations are DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa), ONE.ORG and (PRODUCT) RED. In addition, Bobby is working locally, currently serving his second term as City Councilman of Santa Monica.
Robert Sargent Shriver III was born on April 28, 1954, in Chicago. He is the oldest child of R. Sargent Shriver, Jr., who started the Peace Corps and created President Johnson's War on Poverty programs (e.g., Head Start, The Job Corps) and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics.
After graduating cum laude from Yale College (as a member of the scroll and key secret society), Shriver began a career as a journalist, working for the Annapolis Evening Capitol in Maryland. From there, he followed a traditional journalist's odyssey, from Chicago's City News Bureau to the Chicago Daily News, and then the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He later left the newspaper business to attend law school. Upon graduation in 1981 from Yale Law, he returned to Southern California to clerk for Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt at the Federal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Judicial Circuit. After his clerkship, Shriver moved to New York, where, with former United States Defense Secretary Harold Brown and James D. Wolfensohn (Australian-American lawyer, investment banker, and economist who served as the ninth president of the World Bank Group), he worked in the venture capital partnership of the Wolfensohn firm.
In 1987, Shriver produced the first-ever primetime program on the Special Olympics World Games for ABC. That same year, he produced (with Jimmy and Vicki Iovine) the first of nine A Very Special Christmas records (two of which were recorded live at The White House). The success of these two projects led him to form Special Olympic Productions, an on-going entity for fundraising through entertainment-related projects. These projects have raised more than $100 million to support Special Olympics organizations around the world.
In 1999, one of the Very Special Christmas artists, Bono, asked Shriver to help him with the Jubilee 2000 campaign. The goal behind Jubilee was to cancel the debt of the world's poorest nations by building political support with a petition drive. Six million signatures had been collected in Europe, but only six thousand had been collected in the United States. Shriver advised that, rather than collect signatures, they should lobby Congress to "get the check" necessary to finance debt cancellation. Bono and Shriver went to work recruiting Republicans and in 2000, Congressman John Kasich led the floor fight to increase the $60 million allocated for African debt relief to $435 million.
The debt-relief successes in Washington enabled Bono and Shriver to found DATA. DATA works with African leaders to determine which anti-AIDS and poverty interventions are working and which are not, as well as to do policy research on G8 government's budgets. In 2002, President George W. Bush proposed $15 billion in the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).
In 2004, Bono and Shriver again teamed up, this time to form the ONE Campaign to build grassroots support for DATA's lobbying goals. In 2008, DATA combined with ONE. This unified team continues to build on its grass-roots movement of 2.4 million Americans calling for the U.S. and all G8 governments to help Africans fight AIDS and end extreme poverty.
In 2006, Bono and Shriver founded PRODUCT (RED) to fight the Africa AIDS epidemic with two other powerful forces – producers of world-class consumer goods and world class shoppers. (RED) is a business model, not a charity; corporations advertise their (PRODUCT) RED products as they would any other product, but each time someone buys a (PRODUCT) RED product, up to 50% of the gross profit goes to The Global Fund (www.theglobalfund.org), which – like PEPFAR – provides AIDS medicine funding to African countries based on proven results.
Shriver also produced two movies, True Lies, directed by James Cameron and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mary, Mother of Jesus, for NBC, where he joined his mother Eunice Kennedy Shriver as an executive producer.
Thank You Merck for Supporting PAINT (RED) SAVE LIVES!
We’re so grateful to Merck (known as MSD outside the U.S. and Canada) for coming on board to support PAINT (RED) SAVE LIVES, the first global street art campaign to end AIDS. In case you haven’t heard, over the next month, a collective of the world’s leading street artists will create (RED)-inspired murals around the globe to inspire people and encourage political leaders to properly fund the AIDS fight ahead of The Global Fund’s Sixth Replenishment Conference on October 10th.
Merck’s support of PAINT (RED) SAVE LIVES is part of the company’s long-standing commitment to the HIV/AIDS fight. And when we say “long-standing,” we mean it–Merck has been committed to the AIDS fight since the beginning. Merck scientists began clinical HIV research in the mid-1980s, right around the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first used the term “AIDS.”
Merck scientists were among the first to discover and develop medicines for the treatment of HIV. Since the first HIV products became available, Merck has been working tirelessly to expand access to medicines, strengthen health systems, as well as address global health challenges around the world. Today, a future where HIV/AIDS can be a manageable illness is closer, in part, thanks to Merck.
Thank you Merck for fighting to end AIDS with (RED).
Preventable and treatable diseases are only preventable and treatable for some. (RED) works to end that injustice. Together with its partners, (RED) drives critical awareness for the AIDS fight and funds life-saving grants that empower health workers and provide testing, treatment, and care in places where injustice enables pandemics to thrive. The majority of (RED)-supported grants operate in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to more than two-thirds of the global HIV population. (RED) and the Global Fund work closely together to ensure the money is distributed effectively and transparently across (RED)’s portfolio of grants.
Impact
As of January 2025, (RED) has generated over US$785 million to support Global Fund grants for HIV and AIDS programs in Ghana, Eswatini, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, as well as Colombia and Guatemala. (RED) dollars have impacted the lives of over 290 million people in countries where the Global Fund invests, through locally designed programs that provide HIV testing and counseling, support HIV prevention, provide antiretroviral therapy for HIV-positive individuals, care for children orphaned by AIDS and provide the low-cost treatments needed to reduce the risk of HIV transmission from mother to child. All programs are reviewed and measured for success.
Before (RED), businesses had contributed just US$5 million to the Global Fund, while the public sector had given more than US$5 billion. Within just ten years of launching, (RED) generated more private sector funds than any other business initiative among Global Fund partners. Today, (RED) is the largest private sector contributor to the Global Fund.
The lead singer of Irish rock band U2, Bono was born Paul David Hewson in Dublin. He met the Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton at school, and in 1978 U2 was formed. Acknowledged as one of the best live acts in the world, U2 have sold over 157 million albums and won numerous awards, including 22 Grammys and the Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscience Award. In 2005, U2 was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Alongside his role in U2, Bono is a groundbreaking activist. A leader in Jubilee 2000’s Drop the Debt campaign, he next took on the fight against HIV/AIDS and extreme poverty, co-founding sister organizations ONE and (RED). With ONE, Bono has lobbied heads of state and legislatures all around the world, helping to ensure the passage of global health and development programs, such as the U.S. PEPFAR AIDS program that alone has saved more than 25 million lives over the past 20 years. (RED)—which partners with companies to raise public awareness about, and corporate contributions for, the AIDS crisis—has to date generated more than $750 million for the Global Fund to treat and prevent AIDS in Africa.
Bono is also a cofounder of the Rise Fund, a global impact fund investing in entrepreneurial companies driving positive social and environmental change in alignment with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Bono has received a number of awards for his music and activism, including the Freedom of the City of Dublin (with U2), the Légion d’honneur from the French government, an honorary British knighthood, the Fulbright Prize for International Understanding, and TIME magazine’s Person of the Year (along with Bill and Melinda Gates).
Aliko Dangote Foundation Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Bloomberg LP Bloomberg Philanthropies Iger Bay Foundation Bono Cargill Cary and Katya Pinkowski Cindy and Ryan Beedie David Geffen Foundation Eleanor Crook Foundation Elvia Arguelles Trust Ford Foundation Ann and John Doerr Ann and Joshua Bolten Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation Dr. Mo Ibrahim Open Society Foundations The Rockefeller Foundation The Ron Conway Family Sheryl Sandberg & Tom Bernthal Skoll Foundation Sherwood Foundation Tableau Foundation Coca-Cola Theresia Gouw and Matthew McIntyre Tom Freston
Have you ever heard of PVS? Post Vaccine Syndrome. I guess they are claiming everybody now has HIV/CovAIDS.
According to a new Yale study, some folks who got the COVID-19 vaccine have experienced "immune changes" .... Oh really ....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItCLZX3YDCM 6 min of levity & truths & RED Flags
Thebe Magugu
WTF
Exactly.