The image above is not about the World Health Organization’s (WHO) mishandling of the coronavirus. It’s from an article published in 2015, after the WHO botched their response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. 12
You can see how far we’ve come since then. “Reform” of the WHO has a formula: Use failures as a cry for more. If only the WHO had more enforcement power, more laws and agreements, and more money, it won’t happen again, they claim — while they simultaneously fearmonger about the inevitability of “the next pandemic.”
Can the WHO be reformed?
The House Select Subcommittee recently met to discuss whether the WHO could be reformed in the wake of mishandling COVID.3 The answer is no. The WHO has a long and well-known history of mishandling pandemics and outbreaks (even after so-called reforms) including Ebola, H1N1 (swine flu),4 AIDS, 5 SARS, 6 and most recently COVID (the last two of which were tied to lab leaks 78 in China). There’s been mishandling of funds,9 accusations of corruption of the Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus 10, and findings of sexual assault by WHO staff when responding to an outbreak of Ebola in the Congo.11 Regarding the assault: The known perpetrators did leave the WHO, and the victims of assault by WHO employees were given $250 each, but only after they completed training courses on “income generating activities.”12 Is that reform?
The WHO has continued to grow and fail, with deadly results, after each misstep and crime. One of the U.S. delegates to the WHO, Loyce Pace from the Office of Global Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), defended what she called past efforts at reform in the subcommittee meeting. But her idea of reform was not conducting investigations, restructuring, or replacing those at fault. Instead, she pointed to new committees formed in response to mistakes and tragedies, calling them “reform.” (Check out the SHF recap of the subcommittee hearing here.) And she continues to call on the U.S. and its people to give even more support to the WHO in the form of tax dollars and authority.
If you still need convincing that the organization has no intention of real reform, look to the recent reelection of Director General Tedros,13 from Marxist Ethiopia, who didn’t even have the vote of his home country. 14 Dr. Tedros — who is not a medical doctor, but a doctor of philosophy (Ph.D.) in community health — gave great deference to China on the COVID outbreak, including delayed declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and parroting Chinese claims that SARS-CoV-2 would not transmit from human to human.
There’s a global consensus that under his leadership, the WHO mishandled yet another disease outbreak, this time amounting to the most devastating pandemic in a century, both in human lives and in economic terms. In other words, despite previous “reforms” that included new committees, more surveillance, greatly expanded scope through the 2005 amendments to the International Health Organization, and a growing bank account, the failures have only become more catastrophic in return. Is this reform?
There is no reform. The WHO is doing exactly what it was meant to do.
The spiral of history
In 1944, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Raymond B. Fosdick, stood before the American Public Health Association at a conference in New York City and declared, “A world health organization must inevitably be attached to any world peace organization.”15 He said this in the context of describing what he called deplorable health conditions in China that were a threat to us here in the United States.
The WHO didn’t exist until 1948. There was no centralized international health organization of any sort until the turn of the 20th century because of the general desire of countries around the globe to keep to themselves and avoid loss of sovereignty. Once regional organizations started to appear, the only actions agreed upon were that countries would notify others if they had outbreaks, and that they would serve as clearinghouses for the exchange of information about epidemics. These offices had no enforcement power and existed only as a place for information exchange and support of governments during outbreaks.
At the time of Fosdick’s comment (who was also not a medical doctor), there was an international organization called the League of Nations, which did have a health organization (LNHO), though other health organizations of the day, including Rockefeller Foundation’s own International Health Division, had more clout.
Shockingly, the U.S. was not a part of the League of Nations. This was a huge blow to President Woodrow Wilson because the league was his idea, proposed in the Treaty of Versailles which ended the first World War. The Senate voted twice not to join because provisions would override American sovereignty.
We refused no assistance that we could possibly render. All the great energy and power of the Republic were put at the service of the good cause. We have not been ungenerous. We have been devoted to the cause of freedom, humanity, and civilization everywhere. Now we are asked, in the making of peace, to sacrifice our sovereignty in important respects, to involve ourselves almost without limit in the affairs of other nations and to yield up policies and rights which we have maintained throughout our history.
We are asked to incur liabilities to an unlimited extent and furnish assets at the same time which no man can measure. I think it is not only our right but our duty to determine how far we shall go. Not only must we look carefully to see where we are being led into endless disputes and entanglements, but we must not forget that we have in this country millions of people of foreign birth and parentage. –Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, congressional speech, August 1919.
Despite lack of Senate support, Wilson continued to send American public health officials to the LNHO to work. (Remember the public health officers, like the CDC now, are under presidential control as an executive agency).
Wilson understood he needed the public on his side for his international interventions. He had campaigned under the slogan, “He kept us out of war,” but then chose to involve the U.S. in the very war he kept America out of. So in 1917, he created the Committee on Public Information, which many knew as the Creel Committee, and some newspapers of the time referred to as the Committee on Misinformation. It was created to convince Americans that getting involved in global affairs was a good idea. One writer described it as an “attempt to mobilize public opinion behind the war effort with every available form of mass communication.”16
There was no social media back then, so the Creel Committee used newspapers and movie theaters. “Creel, a former journalist, particularly targeted newspapers. He later estimated that the news division placed material in 20,000 newspaper columns each week during the war.”17 The Library of Congress tells us there were over 75,000 “engaged patriotic local residents” who were trained to give 4-minute speeches at movie theaters between changes of reels of film.18
To reach the public who couldn’t access newspapers or movies and saturate public consciousness with a “patriotic fervor,” they engaged the art community for paintings, posters, sculptures, exhibitions, and more.19
FDR, who was president after Wilson, learned from Wilson’s mistakes and was able to get Congress on board to create The United Nations to replace the defunct League of Nations. The public health outreach arm, of course, is named the World Health Organization.
In this history, you can clearly see the seeds of things like the Biden administration’s failed Disinformation Governance Board and the commandeering of social media to spread the propaganda of destructive and unwanted coronavirus policy.
No country has ever exited the WHO… yet
The WHO Constitution does not have a provision for withdrawal. Neither does the U.N. Charter. This was intentional because countries left the League of Nations as a method of political blackmail or to avoid their obligations.
The U.S., however, when joining the WHO, put on record our own path for leaving: one-year notice and all dues paid.
Many know that Trump started the process of leaving the WHO, but the Biden administration swiftly reversed course after he took office.
There has been only one other attempt to leave. In 1948, just after joining, Soviet Union countries announced they were leaving the WHO. But Brock Chrisholm from Canada, who was head at the time, very strategically never accepted their resignation and let them back in years later in the 1950s after the death of Stalin.20
Let’s pause for a moment to reflect: The only attempts to leave the WHO in its 75-year history were by Communists who said the U.S. had too much influence, and then by the U.S. who said Communist China had too much influence. What does that tell us about the organization’s leadership, policy, and dynamics? What does it tell us about the ability of the organization to be reformed? The pendulum has swung from left to right over 75 years, but at its core, the organization has been ineffective and corrupted as two cold-warring ideologies have fought for control.
So this plan for global health security through a pandemic treaty and amendments to the IHR isn’t the beginning of a new era, it’s the end of a long game plan that has been in place for decades, at least. It’s not about health, it’s about control.
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