Re: “What the IHRP Report Means for America, WHO, and the Future of Global Health”
When I read articles like “What the IHRP Report Means for America, WHO, and the Future of Global Health” by David Bell, Ramesh Thakur, and Roger Bate, I miss Twitter/X for the ability to react briefly, without expectation of a formal essay or full critique. With that in mind, readers of this post will hopefully forgive my use of this space to make a few points about some of the ideas Bell et al. espouse.
It is hard to engage the piece on its own terms because so many core concepts are false. To wit:
- There is no such thing as “global health” or a “global health emergency.” Health is individual. Real emergencies of various kinds are local.
- There is no such thing as a pandemic and therefore no need for any entity or group to be responsible for “core pandemic functions.”
- There is no such thing as “transnational infectious disease threats,” unless we are talking about threats related to importing and exporting anything proven to be a source of or conduit for infectious diseases.
- “Surveillance,” “early warning,” “outbreak verification,” and similar ideas should be recognized for what they are: handmaidens of threat construction and conduits for vaccine development and deployment. The “systems” related to these activities generate signals, categories, dashboards, alerts, and storylines that can then be used to justify declarations, interventions, products, and powers. They are not safeguards; they are part of the machinery that produces fake emergencies and instills fear. The only “warnings” needed with respect to the COVID-19 event were warnings against WHO and member nations’ lies.
- “Communicable disease control” is a specious idea, as the evidence for many diseases said to be “communicated” between people or between people and animals is either thin or contested. Furthermore, as federal- and state-level laws and codes related to “control” (e.g., quarantine, isolation, testing, masking, vaccination) make abundantly clear, there is, in practice, no real difference between “controlling” communicable diseases and controlling the movements and livelihoods of individuals or groups of individuals.
Perhaps the main problem with what Bell et al. assume is their belief that the COVID event revealed the WHO’s “underlying weaknesses,” rather than the entity’s strengths and its unwarranted, unmitigated power, exercised with the full support of the nations and interests that fund it. Where they see failure to properly manage a disease, I see enormous success in pulling off staged episodes and fraud. The related deceptions are longstanding, of course, not limited to the WHO, and (arguably) carried out every “flu season” under the auspices of stable, globe-trotting, illness-causing, contagious pathogens.
But until and unless the trio — and the other authors of the IHRP report they invoke — are able to approach what happened as a strategically planned event, one that followed years of proof-of-concept exercises, they are unlikely to reorient their perspective or arrive at the conclusion that the WHO must be dismantled as soon as possible.
If there is any real skepticism in the piece, I missed it. What I see instead is preservation of Public Health Emergency logic, complete with the pretense that there really are circumstances in which public health powers are justified. Rather than reject the frameworks, assumptions, and entities that gave us Last Time, or seriously question whether Last Time was legitimate in any way, David Bell, Ramesh Thakur, and Roger Bate argue only for managing it all better Next Time.
The correct amount of “authority” the WHO should be given over anyone or anything any time is zero.
Note: An earlier version mistakenly referred to Roger Bate as “Roger Bates.”
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