From the Brownstone Institute

BY DAVID BELL

The WHO decided that the response for a Toronto aged care resident and a young mother in a Malawian village should be essentially the same – stop them from meeting family and working, then inject them with the same patented chemicals.

Much has been written on the current proposals putting the World Health Organization (WHO) front and center of future pandemic responses. With billions of dollars in careers, salaries, and research funding on the table, it is difficult for many to be objective. However, there are fundamentals here that everyone with public health training should agree upon. Most others, if they take time to consider, would also agree. Including, when divorced from party politicking and soundbites, most politicians.

So here, from an orthodox public health standpoint, are some problems with the proposals on pandemics to be voted on at the World Health Assembly at the end of this month.

Unfounded Messaging on Urgency

The Pandemic Agreement (treaty) and IHR amendments have been promoted based on claims of a rapidly increasing risk of pandemics. In fact, they pose an ‘existential threat’ (i.e. one that may end our existence) according to the G20’s High Level Independent Panel in 2022. However, the increase in reported natural outbreaks on which the WHO, the World Bank, G20, and others based these claims is shown to be unfounded in a recent analysis from the UK’s University of Leeds. The main database on which most outbreak analyses rely, the GIDEON database, shows a reduction in natural outbreaks and resultant mortality over the past 10 to 15 years, with the prior increase between 1960 and 2000 fully consistent with the development of the technologies necessary to detect and record such outbreaks; PCR, antigen and serology tests, and genetic sequencing.

The WHO does not refute this but simply ignores it. Nipah viruses, for example, only ‘emerged’ in the late 1990s when we found ways to actually detect them. Now we can readily distinguish new variants of coronavirus to promote uptake of pharmaceuticals. The risk does not change by detecting them; we just change the ability to notice them. We also have the ability to modify viruses to make them worse – this is a relatively new problem. But do we really want an organization influenced by China, with North Korea on its executive board (insert your favorite geopolitical rivals), to manage a future bioweapons emergency?

Irrespective of growing evidence that Covid-19 was not a natural phenomenon, modelling that the World Bank quotes as suggesting a 3x increase in outbreaks over the next decade actually predicts that a Covid-like event will recur less than once per century. Diseases that the WHO uses to suggest an increase in outbreaks over the past 20 years, including cholera, plague, yellow fever, and influenza variants were orders of magnitude worse in past centuries.

This all makes it doubly confusing that the WHO is breaking its own legal requirements in order to push through a vote without Member States having time to properly review implications of the proposals. The urgency must be for reasons other than public health need. Others can speculate why, but we are all human and all have egos to protect, even when preparing legally binding international agreements.

Low Relative Burden

The burden (e.g. death rate or life years lost) of acute outbreaks is a fraction of the overall disease burden, far lower than many endemic infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, and tuberculosis, and a rising burden of non-communicable disease. Few natural outbreaks over the past 20 years have resulted in more than 1,000 deaths – or 8 hours of tuberculosis mortality. Higher-burden diseases should dominate public health priorities, however dull or unprofitable they may seem.

With the development of modern antibiotics, major outbreaks from the big scourges of the past like Plague and typhus ceased to occur. Though influenza is caused by a virus, most deaths are also due to secondary bacterial infections. Hence, we have not seen a repeat of the Spanish flu in over a century. We are better at healthcare than we used to be and have improved nutrition (generally) and sanitation. Widespread travel has eliminated the risks of large immunologically naive populations, making our species more immunologically resilient. Cancer and heart disease may be increasing, but infectious diseases overall are declining. So where should we focus?

Lack of Evidence Base

Investment in public health requires both evidence (or high likelihood) that the investment will improve outcomes and an absence of significant harm. The WHO has demonstrated neither with their proposed interventions. Neither has anyone else. The lockdown and mass vaccination strategy promoted for Covid-19 resulted in a disease that predominantly affects elderly sick people leading to 15 million excess deaths, even increasing mortality in young adults. In past acute respiratory outbreaks, things got better after one or perhaps two seasons, but with Covid-19 excess mortality persisted.

Within public health, this would normally mean we check whether the response caused the problem. Especially if it’s a new type of response, and if past understanding of disease management predicted that it would. This is more reliable than pretending that past knowledge did not exist. So again, the WHO (and other public-private partnerships) are not following orthodox public health, but something quite different.

Centralization for a Highly Heterogeneous Problem

Twenty-five years ago, before private investors became so interested in public health, it was accepted that decentralization was sensible. Providing local control to communities that could then prioritize and tailor health interventions themselves can provide better outcomes. Covid-19 underlined the importance of this, showing how uneven the impact of an outbreak is, determined by population age, density, health status, and many other factors. To paraphrase the WHO, ‘Most people are safe, even when some are not.’

However, for reasons that remain unclear to many, the WHO decided that the response for a Toronto aged care resident and a young mother in a Malawian village should be essentially the same – stop them from meeting family and working, then inject them with the same patented chemicals. The WHO’s private sponsors, and even the two largest donor countries with their strong pharmaceutical sectors, agreed with this approach. So too did the people paid to implement it. It was really only history, common sense, and public health ethics that stood in the way, and they proved much more malleable.

Absence of Prevention Strategies Through Host Resilience

The WHO IHR amendments and Pandemic Agreement are all about detection, lockdowns, and mass vaccination. This would be good if we had nothing else. Fortunately, we do. Sanitation, better nutrition, antibiotics, and better housing halted the great scourges of the past. An article in the journal Nature in 2023 suggested that just getting vitamin D at the right level may have cut Covid-19 mortality by a third. We already knew this and can speculate on why it became controversial. It’s really basic immunology.

Nonetheless, nowhere within the proposed US$30+ billion annual budget is any genuine community and individual resilience supported. Imagine putting a few billion more into nutrition and sanitation. Not only would you dramatically reduce mortality from occasional outbreaks, but more common infectious diseases, and metabolic diseases such as diabetes and obesity, would also go down. This would actually reduce the need for pharmaceuticals. Imagine a pharmaceutical company, or investor, promoting that. It would be great for public health, but a suicidal business approach.

Conflicts of Interest

All of which brings us, obviously, to conflicts of interest. The WHO, when formed, was essentially funded by countries through a core budget, to address high-burden diseases on country request. Now, with 80% of its use of funds specified directly by the funder, its approach is different. If that Malawian village could stump up tens of millions for a program, they would get what they ask for. But they don’t have that money; Western countries, Pharma, and software moguls do.

Most people on earth would grasp that concept far better than a public health workforce heavily incentivized to think otherwise. This is why the World Health Assembly exists and has the ability to steer the WHO in directions that don’t harm their populations. In its former incarnation, the WHO considered conflict of interest to be a bad thing. Now, it works with its private and corporate sponsors, within the limits set by its Member States, to mold the world to their liking.

The Question Before Member States

To summarize, while it’s sensible to prepare for outbreaks and pandemics, it’s even more sensible to improve health. This involves directing resources to where the problems are and using them in a way that does more good than harm. When people’s salaries and careers become dependent on changing reality, reality gets warped. The new pandemic proposals are very warped. They are a business strategy, not a public health strategy. It is the business of wealth concentration and colonialism – as old as humanity itself.

The only real question is whether the majority of the Member States of the World Health Assembly, in their voting later this month, wish to promote a lucrative but rather amoral business strategy, or the interests of their people.

From the Brownstone Institute

BY DANIEL NUCCIO  

As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities

If you ever had the vague sense that Covid relief funding worked in a manner akin to US aid packages in failed Middle Eastern dictatorships, your instincts weren’t wrong.

First off, there were cases of just outright fraud nearing the $200 billion mark with drug gangs and racketeers collecting Covid unemployment benefits from the US government, with some recipient fraudsters not even having the common decency of being honest American fraudsters.

Even worse, though, were some legitimate uses of Covid funds that actually counted as legitimate despite being laughably frivolous or clearly unrelated to nominal goals connected to public health or helping communities deal with the economic impact of the virus – or, more accurately, the lockdowns.

One of the most should-be-satirical-but-actually-real examples of a legitimate use of Covid cash was a researcher at North Dakota State University being awarded $300,000 by the National Science Foundation through a grant funded at least in part through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to aid her in her 2023 efforts to reimagine grading in the name of equity. (If none of that makes sense, please don’t hurt yourself with mental pirouettes.)

Other more mundane projects pertained to prisons and law enforcement using Covid relief money for purposes that extended well-beyond simply paying salaries or keeping the lights on. In 2022 The Appeal and The Marshall Project  reported on how large sums of Covid money went to prison construction and expansion projects and to outfit police departments with new weaponry, vehicles, and canines. Regardless of how you feel about law enforcement or our prison system, these probably did little to stop the spread of Covid or keep out-of-work bartenders afloat while public health bureaucrats consulted horoscopes or goat entrails or their equally useful models to divine the proper time to let businesses reopen safely at half-capacity to diners willing to wear a mask between bites but too afraid to leave their homes.

Yet, of course, that didn’t stop people from trying to make the case that these expenditures absolutely were essential to slowing the spread. Often coming off like precocious children explaining to their parents how a new puppy would help teach them responsibility or an overpriced pair of sneakers would facilitate their social-emotional development by ensuring the cool kids would like them, local sheriffs and city managers were reported as claiming prison expansions could help prisoners social distance from each other, new tasers would help officers social distance from suspects, and new vehicles would allow officers to take their cars home with them rather than share one with another officer who might end up contaminating it with their Covid cooties.

But even worse than the funds that were outright plundered or just snatched up as part of a cash grab were those that were used on projects that helped further erode the freedoms of American citizens.

As documented in a 2023 report from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, more than seventy local governments used ARPA funds to expand surveillance programs in their communities, purchasing or licensing gunshot detection systems, automatic license plate readers, drones, social media monitoring tools, and equipment to hack smartphones and other connected devices.

Sometimes EPIC reported that this was done with little, if any, public debate over the civil liberties and privacy concerns inherent to these tools. In one case from a town in Ohio, approval for ARPA-funded ALPRs – cameras that can create a searchable, time-stamped history for the movements of passing vehicles – came after only a 12-minute presentation by their police chief.

Similarly, schools also likely used money from ARPA, as well as the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, for their own surveillance purposes, although documentation of how schools used their Covid money is said to be somewhat spotty at best.

Vice News in 2021 reported how Ed Tech and surveillance vendors such as Motorola Solutions, Verkada, and  SchoolPass marketed their products as tools to help reduce the spread of Covid and allow schools to reopen safely.

Some attempts such as Vice’s description of SchoolPass presenting ALPRs as a means to assist with social distancing come off like police departments explaining the social distancing benefits of tasers.

Others, however, such as Motorola plying schools with lists of behavioral analysis programs that “monitor social distancing violations” and room occupancy while “automat[ing] the detection of students who are not wearing face masks,” seem to offer a glimpse of the dystopian future into which we are heading – as do the other surveillance tools bought with Covid cash.

Maybe at some point Disease X, about which our ruling class has been warning us, will hit and the additional drones, ALPRs, and social media monitoring tools bought by the law enforcement agencies reported on by EPIC will be used to monitor adults for social distancing violations and automatically detect who isn’t wearing a mask. Maybe those tools will just be used to keep a digital notebook of the daily activities of everyone while police reassure us that they promise only to look at it when they really really need to.

In either case, though, if you currently have the vague sense that post-Covid America is a little more like a Chinese surveillance state than in the Before Times, your instincts are dead-on.