Along with many other Woke organisations, the World Health Organisation will have its swamp drained by the new US President, Donald Trump.
The WHO is gone. The Paris Agreement is finished. Is the United Nations next on the list?
Five years ago, the Covid pandemic shone a spotlight on the WHO and its supposed role in managing viral outbreaks. Its initial advice on January 10, 2020, stated: ‘There are no specific health measures for travellers to and from Wuhan, China.’
On March 11 of that same year, it belatedly reclassified the situation as a pandemic, but by this time Covid had spread to over 100 countries.
In all aspects of pandemic management, as the numbers of infected and dying expanded, the world’s premier health body was missing in action.
The World Health Organisation was established in Geneva in 1948 as an off-shoot of the United Nations. It now has over 5,500 staff.
From personal experience working on overseas aid projects in the 1980s, I found the WHO’s input to be minimal. The occasional representative would fly in, first class, stay at the best hotel, and have a chat before heading off again.
Its 2019 budget was US$5.8 billion – now it is $6.3 billion. A large amount of that budget was spent on offices. It is difficult to find the exact total outlaid for administration as opposed to ‘the sharp end’, but a figure of half has been suggested.
The WHO was intended to generally improve primary health care and access to medicine and health products. In this role, it led to the eradication of smallpox and the near-eradication of polio. Multiple reviews have questioned the WHO’s current aims and motivation now that it has shifted its focus from combatting disease to ‘a health system-oriented approach to build synergies’.
Fundamentally, the WHO has changed from an organisation that copes with health emergencies to one that is preoccupied with gender equality, human rights, and sustainable development. Its latest budget has increased, whilst its allocation of funds to polio eradication has declined.
In 2009, one medical journal reported on the WHO’s response to the H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic. Its sole contribution was to (belatedly) declare a pandemic.
In the African Ebola outbreak (2014-16), the WHO was slow to respond to 30,000 cases and 10,000 deaths. A review by a medical journal in 2016 perceived the organisation to be overly bureaucratic, slow to act, and poorly coordinated. Recommendations were made, but none have been enacted.
It was the Covid outbreak that showed the WHO to be incapable of fulfilling its role as the leader of global medical management. It gave outdated statistics, was far too late to proclaim a pandemic, and gave confusing advice (masks, vaccine efficacy, and mandates). It also produced meaningless statements like, ‘All countries should increase their level of preparedness and rapidly institute necessary measures.’
The WHO – conspicuously – failed to call out China for its early concealment of the pandemic, whilst praising its leadership for authoritarian control. Perversely, it also praised Beijing for its transparency. In January 2021, when the WHO travel advice was issued, China was already engaged in a coverup that had been going on for months. This included the imprisonment of doctors who tried to notify international health authorities about the outbreak. The WHO even insisted on changing the Wuhan Flu (WuFlu) to Covid 19 to remove any connection to its Chinese origin.
Overall, it appears that funding priorities and personal advancement within the ranks of the WHO are affecting the organisation’s increasingly political policy decisions. To quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ‘Something is rotten in the State of Denmark.’
As is the case with many organisations associated with the United Nations, we should question what is being achieved by this cumbersome bureaucracy, and whether its vast budget could (and should) be better spent.
Despite years of warning, the WHO’s lack of pandemic preparation and its bureaucratic process was too slow to occupy the position of a global leader.
This will not be the last time the world faces a pandemic.
The adverse outcome of the previous failures has not only cost lives, but created a mental health crisis, delayed other critical medical treatments, impacted the education system, and caused a huge disturbance to the economy. An estimated 120 million worldwide are thought to have been pushed into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic.
Rather than admitting to its failures, the WHO wants to introduce its pandemic legislation to strengthen the legal power of its health advice across signatory countries. This will effectively make the organisation a supranational public health authority. In the event of another pandemic, the WHO planst to assume overall control of the situation and apply advice and restrictions as it sees fit.
Its agenda has already been distorted by the ‘principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion’ – so we must ask, where will this end? The small print reveals that, rather than being confined directly to health matters, the WHO will also have input on factors that indirectly affect health, such as climate change, immigration, identity politics, and wealth redistribution.
Under the guise of pandemic management, this is an undemocratic power grab that risks a loss of national sovereignty for countries like Australia.
We need to be aware of what’s going on with the World Health Organisation. Perhaps Donald Trump has the solution, and we should follow?
Dr Graham Pinn, Retired consultant Physician and Tropical Medicine Specialist FRCP, FRACP, FACTM, MRNZCGP, DCH