Brownstone Institute
Tedros Must Face Reality
From the Brownstone Institute
It would be easier to ignore the World Health Assembly’s (WHA) deliberations in Geneva this week, but the opening address of the Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, deserves a response. Both the WHO and its director are completely divorcing themselves from reality, illustrating how dangerous and unfit for purpose the WHO has become. There is clearly no way that any vote should proceed on anything of importance that the WHO may be required to implement in the coming week of WHA deliberations.
Tedros’s emphasis was on pandemics, and the faltering agreements intended to address their risk, the new Pandemic Agreement, and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR). While these are watered down and the Pandemic Agreement may not even get to a vote, his continued justification for centering greater coordination and power at the WHO speaks volumes about the problem we face.
The Covid-19 period has resulted, as Tedros notes in his address, in up to 20 million additional deaths. WHO-supported policies achieved this, for a virus whose mortality mostly occurred in chronically sick people over 75 years of age. The WHO notes that a little over 7 million are directly attributable to the virus. Many of these other 13 million occurred in low- and middle-income countries, in populations where less than 1% of people are over 75 years old and half are under twenty, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a staggering, appalling, incompetent, and entirely predictable achievement. However, it is going to get much worse. The policies the WHO promoted closed supply lines, shut down the workplaces of tens of millions of day laborers, stopped travel and tourism income on which millions of low-income people rely, closed markets, and pushed over hundreds of millions into severe poverty. They increased the indebtedness of nations globally, with direct effects on child mortality and the ability to grow future economies.
As predicted by the WHO itself, malaria and tuberculosis deaths have increased, and they will stay higher as the impact of increased poverty bites. Funding for essential sanitation and nutrition programs has dropped as the WHO pushed for a shift in funding to mass vaccination in countries with young populations for a disease of the elderly to which they were already immune, supported with frankly idiotic slogans with more to do with advertising than public health, such as “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
In closing schools, for up to two years in some countries, the world has cemented in intergenerational poverty and inequality, overwhelmingly harming hundreds of millions of children at most future risk. Child labor has increased, and up to ten million additional girls are being forced into child marriage with the poverty and abuse that entails. When Tedros states in his opening WHA speech that “the whole world was taken hostage,” this should be what he is referring to. The world was taken hostage by the appalling people who took over public health, used the WHO as a tool with its leadership’s consent, and made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit through these harms foisted on others. Indeed, as Tedros notes, “covid has affected everybody.”
Amidst all this rhetoric, the WHO is completely ignoring, and knowingly misrepresenting, what their own data tells them on the risk of natural pandemics. Whilst deliberately misleading countries and the media with claims that the risk of pandemics is rapidly increasing, they are fully aware that deaths from infectious diseases, and pandemics, have decreased over past centuries and are decreasing now. The databases and citations of reports from the WHO, the World Bank, and G20 High Level Independent Panel attest to this.
The causes of infectious disease deaths predominantly revolve around poor nutrition, sanitation, and supply lines for basic medicines. All these, improving before 2020, are now put at risk. Pretending that new diagnostic technologies that allow us to distinguish small virus outbreaks from the declining background constitute increased risk is a public health fallacy that must surely be deliberate. When Tedros states that the drafting teams of the pandemic texts “operated amid a torrent of mis- and disinformation,” he is correct, but it was not from the source he suggests.
So, when we are told that the “world was unprepared” for Covid-19, we should understand that we were unprepared for the hijacking of the WHO and public health policy, not for a virus that had an infection fatality rate in most countries little different than influenza. Pretending that deaths from ‘lockdowns’ were due to Covid adds to the current denial of reality. Lockdown was and should remain a term describing imprisonment. In public health it has been promoted by those who ended up gaining from the Covid debacle; private and corporate funders and their followers. There is a reason why public health previously stressed honest messaging and individual choice.
If the world is to actually address the risk presented by a repeat of Covid, then it had better address its cause – which looks increasingly likely to have been a laboratory leak from gain-of-function research. Nothing in the texts of the proposed Pandemic Agreement or IHR amendments even refers to this. Spending tens of billions per year on a surveillance network for natural threats will impoverish millions and divert funds from diseases of far higher burden, but do nothing to address the problem of research laboratories being paid to enhance virus virulence in humans. The proposed PABS scheme in the Pandemic Agreement in which the WHO will oversee increased passage of pathogens between laboratories and WHO-partnered pharmaceutical companies will likely do more to raise risk than reduce it.
We can all be relieved that the proposed pandemic texts are watered down from their egregious original versions and the Pandemic Agreement is unready for this WHA session. However, any increased coordination of power in the hands of the WHO, in its current state, is dangerous. The world has undergone enough damage in the past four years through misdirection and deliberate misinformation from an international agency that always knew better. Until the root causes of this are addressed, including ever-increasing influence on the organization of private individuals and corporate entities, and the glaring conflicts of interest in related public-private partnerships such as Gavi and CEPI, the world does indeed remain at increasing risk of the repeat of the disaster to which it was recently subjected.
We must first address the reasons why international public health is now about profit and centralization, rather than the health of populations. This won’t happen under the current version of the WHO, and does not appear on the WHA agenda. We are facing a mass denial of reality by the WHO and its leadership. Until this is rectified, any WHA votes that grant further powers or oversight to the WHO are unlikely to be in the interests of the world’s population, or the countries within which they live.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
What War Means
My mother once told me how my father still woke up screaming in the night years after I was born, decades after the Second World War (WWII) ended. I had not known – probably like most children of those who fought. For him, it was visions of his friends going down in burning aircraft – other bombers of his squadron off north Australia – and to be helpless, watching, as they burnt and fell. Few born after that war could really appreciate what their fathers, and mothers, went through.
Early in the movie Saving Private Ryan, there is an extended D-Day scene of the front doors of the landing craft opening on the Normandy beaches, and all those inside being torn apart by bullets. It happens to one landing craft after another. Bankers, teachers, students, and farmers being ripped in pieces and their guts spilling out whilst they, still alive, call for help that cannot come. That is what happens when a machine gun opens up through the open door of a landing craft, or an armored personnel carrier, of a group sent to secure a tree line.
It is what a lot of politicians are calling for now.
People with shares in the arms industry become a little richer every time one of those shells is fired and has to be replaced. They gain financially, and often politically, from bodies being ripped open. This is what we call war. It is increasingly popular as a political strategy, though generally for others and the children of others.
Of course, the effects of war go beyond the dismembering and lonely death of many of those fighting. Massacres of civilians and rape of women can become common, as brutality enables humans to be seen as unwanted objects. If all this sounds abstract, apply it to your loved ones and think what that would mean.
I believe there can be just wars, and this is not a discussion about the evil of war, or who is right or wrong in current wars. Just a recognition that war is something worth avoiding, despite its apparent popularity amongst many leaders and our media.
The EU Reverses Its Focus
When the Brexit vote determined that Britain would leave the European Union (EU), I, like many, despaired. We should learn from history, and the EU’s existence had coincided with the longest period of peace between Western European States in well over 2,000 years.
Leaving the EU seemed to be risking this success. Surely, it is better to work together, to talk and cooperate with old enemies, in a constructive way? The media, and the political left, center, and much of the right seemed at that time, all of nine years ago, to agree. Or so the story went.
We now face a new reality as the EU leadership scrambles to justify continuing a war. Not only continuing, but they had been staunchly refusing to even countenance discussion on ending the killing. It has taken a new regime from across the ocean, a subject of European mockery, to do that.
In Europe, and in parts of American politics, something is going on that is very different from the question of whether current wars are just or unjust. It is an apparent belief that advocacy for continued war is virtuous. Talking to leaders of an opposing country in a war that is killing Europeans by the tens of thousands has been seen as traitorous. Those proposing to view the issues from both sides are somehow “far right.”
The EU, once intended as an instrument to end war, now has a European rearmament strategy. The irony seems lost on both its leaders and its media. Arguments such as “peace through strength” are pathetic when accompanied by censorship, propaganda, and a refusal to talk.
As US Vice-President JD Vance recently asked European leaders, what values are they actually defending?
Europe’s Need for Outside Help
A lack of experience of war does not seem sufficient to explain the current enthusiasm to continue them. Architects of WWII in Europe had certainly experienced the carnage of the First World War. Apart from the financial incentives that human slaughter can bring, there are also political ideologies that enable the mass death of others to be turned into an abstract and even positive idea.
Those dying must be seen to be from a different class, of different intelligence, or otherwise justifiable fodder to feed the cause of the Rules-Based Order or whatever other slogan can distinguish an ‘us’ from a ‘them’…While the current incarnation seems more of a class thing than a geographical or nationalistic one, European history is ripe with variations of both.
Europe appears to be back where it used to be, the aristocracy burning the serfs when not visiting each other’s clubs. Shallow thinking has the day, and the media have adapted themselves accordingly. Democracy means ensuring that only the right people get into power.
Dismembered European corpses and terrorized children are just part of maintaining this ideological purity. War is acceptable once more. Let’s hope such leaders and ideologies can be sidelined by those beyond Europe who are willing to give peace a chance.
There is no virtue in the promotion of mass death. Europe, with its leadership, will benefit from outside help and basic education. It would benefit even further from leadership that values the lives of its people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
It is, yet again, fashionable amongst the dwindling tribe of progressives to yell loudly that what is happening now in DC is a coup.
Donald Trump (and his Muskian minions) are running roughshod over the government, destroying norms and constitutional precedents and being very rude about it in the process.
Despite being elected on a platform of doing exactly that only a few months ago, the deep and/or woke state (before woke became a cool and easy way to grift graft billions, the deep state didn’t really care about things like trans whale rights, by the way) and its well-credentialed but poorly educated horde of government job dependent supporters are crying – literally – foul.
Elon Musk is unelected. You have no right. This is not a dictatorship. How dare you change anything that has worked so well for us for decades? At least slow it down. (Note – if you really thought you were being murdered you would yell “Stop!,” not “Slow down,” so maybe even progwokes get it, at least at a subconscious level.)
This is a coup, they yell.
Well, no it’s not. The nation – eyes wide open – elected Trump to do exactly what he is doing right now, whirlwinding through federal agencies to end the generational oligarchical scam.
Note – Joe Biden theoretically was elected to bring normalcy and decency to DC only to see his administration become a corrupt cavalcade of lies. In fact, unlike Trump, Biden did exactly the opposite of what he said (or mumbled or read) during the campaign that he was going to do as president.
If a coup involves false pretense, then look no further than Delaware.
Obviously, all actual coups involve change, but not all change is by definition a coup.
The concepts are not transitive.
And everything that has been done so far is well within the purview of the president – in theory, Joe Biden could have done everything Trump is doing now, if his handlers had let him or if it had ever occurred to him to do so.
What is happening is not a coup – it’s basic reform. It’s trying to sort out the absurdities of government spending and programs and to shut down the most egregious; case in point the USAID.
Vast billions slushed through the agency (one hopes the ludicrously named, cartoonishly-villainous National Endowment for Democracy is next) under the cover of political correctness and/or expediency on its way around the globe, most of which ended up in odd pockets of strongmen and politicians and “civil society” power-base builders who would then turn around and support the agency and its many many QUANGOs and foundations and such.
The money was not about helping actual real people – it was about creating an international network that could be called upon to do the bidding of the American intelligence community and the globalist socialist socialite statists, now one and the same. When you pay people they will pay you back, however they can, from writing op-eds to going on MSNBC to railing against populism – whatever you need at the moment.
That being said, there is one possible interpretation of the idea of a coup that could have more than an element of truth to it – counting coup.
Counting coup was a Plains Indian warrior tradition in that you didn’t necessarily have to kill your opponent in a battle but merely touch them – essentially bonk them on the head – and get away unscathed. That humiliated your opponent and counted – more than counted – as a moral victory (in fact, amongst the Crow – at least – it was one of four tasks that had to be completed in order to become a war chief.)
It was bravery personified.
And it can be said that Trump, Musk, and his hyper-caffeinated hackers are doing that with every move they make – counting coup.
Millions for gender-diverse Serbians?
Bonk on the head.
Paying global media types to twist the truth to benefit the interests of the deep state, including pushing to prolong the war in Ukraine and even possibly support the impeachment of Trump?
Bonk on the head.
Trying to help overthrow foreign governments?
Bonk on the head.
Government DEI programs?
Bonk on the head.
Paying for the BBC, climate change silliness, and Iraqi puppet shows?
Bonk, bonk, bonk on the head.
Not only is this not an actual coup, this is not even revenge or retribution but long and desperately needed reform.
And while counting coup was a way to humiliate an opponent it is not clear if that is the current intent, though one can be sure there is more than a little snickering glee amongst those involved in the process.
What is happening now is the tearing down – from the inside – of the ossified calcified oppressive state that has built up over the last 40 years.
The deep state is finally getting its much-deserved comeuppance and it may be happening just in time.
Bonk.
Author
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