A spokesman for the Global Fund said on Wednesday that it considered all three candidates “skilled and highly experienced,” that none would be asked to withdraw and the election would proceed as scheduled on Feb. 27. The four-year term of Dr. Mark Dybul, the current executive director, ends on May 31.
A senior United States government official said administration global health officials received the three candidates’ names Monday evening and had not yet met to discuss them.
The fund, which estimates that it has saved 20 million lives since it was founded in 2002, is well respected. In December, Britain’s foreign aid agency
gave it top grades on a “value for money” assessment of 38 aid organizations to which it donates.
But the fund has long
struggled to raise money. It was originally hoped that donors would commit $10 billion a year. Instead, it gets less than $5 billion.
The United States has always donated a third of the fund’s budget and is by far its greatest source of support.
The finalists, selected from a preliminary list of nine, are: Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, a former health minister of Nigeria; Subhanu Saxena, a drug executive who in August stepped down as chief executive of Cipla, a major Indian pharmaceutical company; and Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand who ran the United Nations Development Program.
Dr. Pate, a former World Bank health specialist, is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health. He has held several Nigerian government jobs, including health minister, for which he was praised for improving primary care, training
midwives to cut maternal and child mortality, and fighting
polio.
The nominating committee’s report noted misuse of funds at one health agency run by Dr. Pate, but said there was “no suggestion of impropriety on his part” and that anticorruption measures he had put in place were not followed after he left.
In July, however, Dr. Pate
posted on Twitter a New Yorker article called “Being Honest About Trump,” including this summary, “To call the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits.”
In December 2015, Dr. Pate, a Muslim, shared a series of articles on Twitter critical of Mr. Trump’s call to ban Muslims.. He shared an article that noted condemnation of Mr. Trump’s call by British and French leaders
in The Washington Post.
Another post, using a headline with
a column in Time by Kareem Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the retired basketball star, said “Donald Trump has more in common with ISIS than America.”
Mr. Saxena is a business executive brought up in Britain. He worked for Citicorp, ran PepsiCo operations in Africa and Russia, and was a longtime executive for Novartis, a pharmaceutical conglomerate with headquarters in Switzerland.
He was responsible for increasing production of CoArtem, a
malaria drug that is a mainstay of the Global Fund and the President’s Malaria Initiative, begun by President George W. Bush’s administration.
From 2013 to 2016, he was chief executive of Cipla, the Indian drug company that is one of the Global Fund’s biggest suppliers. He
stepped down in August, citing “family priorities.”
The report noted that, although he was a businessman, he had worked with governments, regulators and medical charities like Doctors Without Borders.
Yet American officials may look askance at the hiring of an executive from a large pharmaceutical company for whom the Global Fund has been a major customer. By 2015, six million Africans were receiving antiretroviral drugs made by Cipla.
Ms. Clark was elected to New Zealand’s Parliament in 1981 and was prime minister from 1999 to 2008. She became the administrator of the United Nations Development Program in 2009 and was, according to the report, “a reformer, driving much greater organizational efficiency and a major decentralization.”
The Trump administration has expressed hostility toward United Nations programs. Internal
memos obtained by The New York Times show the new administration has considered cutting its support for United Nations’ international operations by at least 40 percent.
Yet the development program has never been a particular target of American conservatives, who tend to criticize the United Nations cultural organization, population planning agency and peacekeeping operations.
Several people familiar with the fund’s search for a director expressed dismay over the choices, worrying that each might jeopardize support from the United States, but none would speak for attribution. One described himself as distressed; another worried that the candidates had not been adequately vetted.
Seth Faison, a spokesman for the fund, argued that no candidate should withdraw.
“Lots of people said things about Trump during the campaign that now are working with him,” he said of Dr. Pate.
Of Mr. Saxena and Ms. Clark, he said, United Nations connections and business connections were unavoidable in virtually any candidate not from a major donor country. The director does not oversee buying from drug companies, he said, and the fund gives money to many recipients, including $300 million to United Nations Development Program and $800 million to Nigeria.
“Anyone who ever worked in any government that got funds from the Global Fund would be off limits, which is not realistic,” he said.
A director could recuse himself from decisions with potential conflicts, he said, and a different fund representative could approach the United States during the next appeal for donations, which typically occur at three-year intervals.
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