One way to determine whether a suggestion is worth following is to look at the evidence presented to support it. If the evidence makes sense and smells real, then perhaps the programme you are asked to sign up for is worthy of consideration. However, if the whole scheme is sold on fallacies that a child could poke a stick through, and its chief proponents cannot possibly believe their own rhetoric, then only a fool would go much further. This is obvious – you don’t buy a used car on a salesman’s insistence that there is no other way to get from your kitchen to your bathroom.
Delegates at the coming World Health Assembly in Geneva are faced with such a choice. In this case, the car salesman is the World Health Organisation (WHO), an organisation still commanding considerable global respect based on a legacy of sane and solid work some decades ago. It also benefits from a persistent misunderstanding that large international organisations would not intentionally lie (they increasingly do, as noted below). The delegates will be voting on the recently completed text of the Pandemic Agreement, part of a broad effort to extract large profits and salaries from an intrinsic human fear of rare causes of death. Fear and confusion distract human minds from rational behaviour.
WHO likes a good story?
The Pandemic Agreement, and the international pandemic agenda it is intended to support, are based on a series of demonstrably false claims:
- There is evidence of a rising risk of severe naturally occurring pandemics due to a rapid (exponential) increase in infectious disease outbreaks.
- A massive return on financial investment is expected from diverting large resources to prepare for, prevent or combat these.
- The COVID-19 outbreak was probably of natural origin, and serves as an example of unavoidable health and financial costs we will incur again if we don’t act now.
If any of these were false, then the basis on which the WHO and its backers have argued for the Pandemic Agreement is fundamentally flawed. And all of them can be shown to be false. However, influential people and organisations want pandemics to be the main focus of public health. WHO supports this because it is paid to. A private sector invested heavily in vaccines, and a few countries with large vaccine and biotech industries, now direct most of WHO’s work through specified funding. WHO is obligated to deliver what these interests direct it to.
WHO was once independent and able to concentrate on health priorities – back when it prioritised the main drivers of sickness and premature mortality and gained the reputation it now trades on. In today’s corporatised public health, population-based approaches have lost value and the aspirations of the World Economic Forum hold more sway than those dying before 60. Success in the health commodities business is about enlarging markets, not reducing the need for intervention. WHO and its reputation are useful tools to sanitise this. Colonialism, as ever, needs to appear altruistic.
Truth is less compelling than fiction
So, to address these fallacies. Infectious disease mortality has steadily declined over the past century despite a minor Covid blip that took us back just a decade. This blip includes the virus, but also the avoidable imposition of poverty, unemployment, reduced healthcare access and other factors that WHO had previously warned against, but recently actively promoted. To get around this reality of decreasing mortality, WHO uses a hypothetical disease (Disease X), a placeholder for something that has not happened since the Spanish Flu in the pre-antibiotic era. The huge medieval pandemics such as the Black Death were mostly bacterial in origin, as were probably most Spanish Flu deaths. With antibiotics, sewers and better food, we now live longer and don’t expect such mortality events, but WHO uses this threat regardless.
Thus, WHO has been reduced to misrepresenting fragile evidence (e.g. ignoring technology developments that can explain rising reports of outbreaks) and opinion pieces by sponsored panels in order to support the narrative of rapidly rising pandemic risk. Even COVID-19 is getting harder to use. If, as appears most likely, it was a result of laboratory manipulation, then it no longer even serves as an outlier. The WHO’s pandemic agenda is squarely targeted at natural outbreaks; hence the need for “Disease X”.
The WHO (and the World Bank) follow a similar approach in inflating financial Return on Investment (RoI). If you received an email promoting over 300 to 700 times return on a proposed investment, some may be impressed but sensible people would suspect something amiss. But this is what the Group of 20 (G20) secretariat told its members in 2022 for return on investment on WHO’s pandemic preparedness proposals. The WHO and the World Bank provided the graphic below to the same G20 meeting to support such astronomical predictions. It is essentially subterfuge; a fantasy to mislead readers such as politicians who are too busy, and trusting, to dig deeper. As these agencies are intended to serve countries rather than fool them, this sort of behaviour, which is recurrent, should call into question their very existence.
A virus like SARS-CoV-2 (causing COVID-19) that mostly targets the sick elderly with an overall infectious mortality rate of about 0.15% will not cost $9 trillion (as depicted in the diagram) unless panicked or greedy people choose to close down the world’s supply lines, implement mass unemployment and then print money for multi-trillion dollar stimulus packages. In contrast, diseases that regularly kill more and much younger people, like tuberculosis, malaria and HIV/AIDS, cost far more than the $22 billion a year the diagram states as a false low in non-pandemic years. A 2021 Lancet article put tuberculosis losses alone at $580 billion per year in 2018. Malaria kills over 600,000 children annually and HIV/AIDS results in similar numbers of dead. These deaths of current and future productive workers, leaving orphaned children, cost countries. Once, they were WHO’s main priority.
Trading on a fading reputation
In selling the package, the WHO seems to have abandoned any attempt at meaningful dialogue. It still justifies the surveillance-lockdown-mass vaccinate model by the logic-free claim that over 14 million lives were saved by Covid vaccines in 2021 (so we all have to do that again). The WHO recorded a little over three million Covid-related deaths in the first (vaccine-free) year of the pandemic. For the 14 million ‘saved’ to be correct, another 17 million would somehow have been due to die in year two, despite most people having gained immunity and many of the most susceptible having already succumbed.
Such childish claims are meant to shock and confuse rather than educate. People are paid to model such numbers to create narratives, and others are paid to spin them on WHO websites and elsewhere. An industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars depends on such messaging. Scientific integrity cannot survive in an organisation paid to be a mouthpiece.
As an alternative, the WHO could advocate investment in areas that have long promoted longevity in wealthy countries – sanitation, better diet and living conditions, and access to a basic level of good medical care. This was once the WHO’s priority because it not only greatly reduces mortality from rare pandemic events (most Covid deaths were in people already very unwell), but also reduces mortality from the big endemic killers such as malaria, tuberculosis, common childhood infections and many chronic non-communicable diseases. It is, unequivocally, the main reason why mortality from major childhood infectious like measles and Whooping Cough plummeted long before mass vaccinations were introduced.
If we concentrated on strategies that improve general health and resilience, rather than the financial health of the pandemic industrial complex, we could then confidently decide not to wreck the lives of our children and elderly if a pandemic did arise. Very few people would be at high risk. We could all expect to live longer and healthier lives. The WHO has elected to leave this path, instil mass and unfounded fear, and support a very different paradigm. While the Pandemic Agreement is not essential to it, it is an important part of diverting funds further funds to this agenda and cementing this corporatist approach into place.
The United States has done well by stepping out of this mess, but continues to push many of the same fallacies and was instrumental in sowing the mess we now reap. While a few other governments are questioning, it is hard for any politicians to stand with truth when a sponsored media stands squarely elsewhere. Society is once more enslaving itself, at the behest of an entitled few, facilitated by international agencies who were set up specifically to guard against this. At the coming World Health Assembly the pandemic fairy tale will almost certainly prevail. The hope among critics is that a well-deserved erosion of trust will eventually catch up with the global health industry and too few countries will ratify this treaty for it ever to come into force. To fix the underlying problem and derail the pandemic industry train, we will need to rethink the whole approach to cooperation in international health.
Dr David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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