Global health reform must go far beyond WHO

Understanding the Depth of a Problem

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently entered the consciousness of many in Western countries as, justifiably, an example of destructive, unaccountable bureaucratic overreach. Seeking to impose restrictions and extract money from individuals and nations for the benefit of well-heeled sponsors, it plays no useful role in the lives of many beyond providing a potential career path for those who want travel, a good salary, and a feeling of altruistic superiority. Through its role in the abrogation of human rights and impoverishment of hundreds of millions during the Covid response, it has spawned an Exit the WHO movement standing on the supremacy of individual and national sovereignty.

(Article by David Bell republished from Brownstone.org)

This is understandable, but it also risks being naive and simplistic. If the WHO is to be torn down, those advocating for this should first recognize why it exists, and its limitations and context. It is not a world hegemonic power and cannot be, but it reflects a far deeper and more complex threat to basic human rights, democracy, and global health itself. Formed to help reduce global inequality in human health, it has contributed to a steady improvement in population health in the past, just as it has shown more recently that it can make things worse. Its actions and outputs reflect its masters, not an independent entity gone rogue.

The WHO therefore needs to be addressed as part of a wider problem. If a privileged few are seeking some sort of global hegemony, the response cannot be based on the wishes of another privileged few. It must involve those who are most helped and most harmed, who pay for the WHO, and who may still rely on it. If this is about sovereign people and sovereign States reasserting their interests, then this is who must own the answer.

The Betrayal of the Peoples

Since 2020, the WHO has orchestrated and condoned one of the most devastating assaults on individual and societal health the world has seen. At the behest of highly conflicted sponsors, this international bureaucracy promoted policies that overwhelmingly harmed the world’s most disadvantaged. The organization turned on those whom it had been set up to serve, returning to the pre-World War Two mindset of technocratic authoritarianism that characterized public health in the era of eugenics, colonialism, and European fascism.

Knowing fully the impact of their actions, the WHO helped force over a hundred million additional people into severe food insecurity and poverty and up to ten million additional girls into child marriage and sexual slavery. It helped deprive a generation of the schooling needed to lift themselves out of poverty and grew national debts to leave countries at the mercy of global predators. This was an intentional response to a virus they knew from the beginning was rarely severe beyond sick elderly people. The WHO helped orchestrate an unprecedented transfer of wealth from those it was originally tasked to protect to those who now sponsor and direct most of its work. Lacking any contrition, the WHO is now seeking increased public funding through misrepresentation of risk and return on investment to entrench this response.

How an Institution Rots

Through its Constitution written in 1946, the WHO was intended to promote the equality of peoples emerging from the wreckage of a World War and colonialism, with all nation-states standing equal and independent as its only authority. This continued through the Declaration of Alma Ata in 1978, placing the needs and requirements of communities under their sovereign governments as the core focus, and informer, of public health.

Like all human institutions, this could not last. High salaries and business-class travel to exotic places attract people who like, and come to believe they are entitled to, such privileges. Staff dependent on an organization for such benefits come to prioritize its welfare over the needs of those it was supposed to serve. Workers detached from the impacts of their actions soon find self-advancement, tenure, and pensions, which are achieved by listening to their funders rather than those impacted by their actions.

Read more at: Brownstone.org