WHO Decides? Part 1: Money

My health is not your business

The world is at a crucial crossroads with imminent changes to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Many are aware of a proposed new treaty and maybe even the changes to the International Health Regulations, but what people might not be aware of are the plans for your money. Beliefs about what happened with covid are not relevant to this discussion. You could think that covid was the biggest public health disaster in history and these plans should still concern you.

Only a few years ago a referendum was won on the basis that UK money should be spent on the NHS not given to a supranational organisation. (Put aside any doubts you may have about the veracity of the numbers in the claim; the fact is that the idea of being able to spend more of our treasury’s cash as we saw fit was, as illustrated by the Brexit vote, an attractive one for a huge number of people.)

Now a different supranational organisation is demanding money from our NHS.

Conflicts of Interest

The story begins back in 1993 when the WHO introduced public-private partnerships into its governance system. It took a full seven years after that before consideration was given within the WHO to potential conflicts of interest and the first safeguards and guidelines to address these concerns were published. At this point GAVI and CEPI were formed. GAVI (calling itself a Global Vaccine Alliance) is a public private partnership that leads on global vaccination campaigns and CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) is the equivalent formed for vaccinations in pandemics. The private organisations collaborate with the WHO to create markets for ‘health’ commodities such as diagnostics and vaccines, and vaccine mandates are the perfect way to do that. It’s a potentially very profitable business model.

The safeguards put in place in 2000 were too little too late. In 2009, the WHO changed the definition of a pandemic to remove any reference to severity. From then on any mutated virus could trigger the announcement of a pandemic. Only weeks later the WHO announced the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic. There were many parallels with covid from overly pessimistic predictions of death (thanks to Neil Ferguson), to massive contracts for vaccination (even before trials had completed). Pharmaceutical companies made huge amounts of money and people were harmed.

Neil Ferguson made the claim, “had we been able to target all school-aged children…then we probably wouldn’t have had an autumn wave to this [swine flu] epidemic. We would have stopped transmission.” The Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control estimated that 6 lives (yes, six, that is not a typo) were saved after vaccinating 5.5 million people against swine flu i.e. about one in a million. Public Health England estimated that the vaccine caused narcolepsy, a lifelong disability causing sudden onset sleep or paralysis, in 30 per million. 

Consequently there were numerous reports written calling out these issues to ensure the same playbook could not be used again to frighten people in order to enrich the pharmaceutical companies. Dame Deidre Hine’s report, even before problems with the vaccine had been acknowledged, said, “Use of the phrase ‘reasonable worst case’ should be reconsidered in future. It suggests that the outcome is relatively likely, whereas this is usually quite the opposite.” and “Ministers should determine early in a pandemic how they will ensure that the response is proportionate to the perceived level of risk.”

In a report commissioned by the European Council and written by a labour MP, Paul Flynn, he said, “In a world characterised by a high level of access to information technologies where lobbying activities and relevant networks of interest groups are increasingly internationalised and professionalised, the problem of possible conflicts of interest of health experts is more topical than ever.”

He went on “It distorted all the priorities of the health service for a year. The health service gave attention to that rather than to the other things that it should have given attention to. It also involved the use of a vaccine that had not been trialled. The people who say it was not fully trialled are those who made it—GlaxoSmithKline and the other producers. That was a major event, and we might consider, knowing what we know now, how we got into that situation.”

He also called out the scaremongering that led to bad decisions being made, “The general feeling of anxiety and unease in the population…can fuel the media in what becomes a cycle of fear mongering…Where uncertainty is coupled with risks for human health and lives, there is also a danger that public opinion can be manipulated in favour of particular commercial interests.” 

These reports were ignored.

The Money

The new WHO proposals will lead to the creation of an international bureaucracy with significant funding. The proposed treaty stipulates that countries dedicate at least 5% of their current health expenditure to pandemic prevention, preparedness, response, and health systems recovery. While this money would be spent within the country, the decision on what it can be spent on would be made by the unaccountable supranational WHO. WHO decides. They will also decide the size of that percentage and whether it will change over time. 

In addition to this large chunk of health budgets there is also a demand for money to be allocated to the WHO directly. Article 19 of the proposed treaty says the parties must “commit to allocate, in accordance with its respective capacities, XX% of its gross domestic product for international cooperation and assistance on pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery.” There is still no clarity on what percentage this will be. WHO decides.

The WHO's annual budget currently sits at around $3.6 billion. The plan references an amount of $31bn per year for this work. That is to say that the WHO is proposing spending ten times their current budget purely on pandemic planning. To put that into perspective $4.3bn was spent globally on malaria care despite it affecting a quarter of a billion people every year and half a million lives of mostly young children. These centralised funds would be directed towards several WHO initiatives, including:

1. WHO Global Pandemic Supply Chain and Logistics Network — i.e. the stockpiling of supplies

2. WHO Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System — huge emphasis on multiple labs carrying out genomic sequencing for a centralised database.

3. Multi-country or regional tabletop exercises every two years — in case there hasn’t been a ‘pandemic’ lately.

4. A ‘global public health emergency workforce’ to contain outbreaks — with a network of training institutions from which they will be deployed.

5. A global compensation mechanism for injuries resulting from pandemic vaccines — because we know the script here:  for a ‘novel’ virus, the one and only solution that can be envisaged by vaccine promoters is (of course) a rushed vaccine.  

What will be the outcome of all that spending?

If you spend that much money hunting for novel viruses, you will find them. The current WHO definition of a pandemic requires only “novelty” with no requirement for severity. The script for a repeat of the Swine Flu fiasco is therefore in play.

Notably, the treaty makes a statement that the parties must ensure that the benefits of pandemic prevention measures must outweigh the cost. How can we find benefits to outweigh the spending of tens of billions of pounds? The only possible benefit would be from finding and declaring more novel viruses as pandemics. Spending a fortune hunting for novel viruses will have no “benefit” if they are then ignored. What is being funded here is nothing less than a pandemic creation engine.

The consequence of the pandemic creation engine, will, as the WHO officials keep saying, be that “there will be another pandemic.” WHO decides. Once a pandemic is declared more money will flow away from our country. The treaty requires that for all pandemic products from tests, PPE, vaccines and therapeutics 20% will go directly to the WHO. Half will be gifted and the other half at cost price. 

Accountability and Withdrawal

A clause in the treaty is dedicated to accountability. The entire clause is dedicated to the accountability of the nation states without a single mention of any accountability for the WHO themselves. In truth, there will be no accountability. WHO decides.

The treaty sets out a two year period after signing during which a country cannot leave. Thereafter there is a requirement for a year’s notice period. That means that signing the treaty will commit a country to a minimum of three year’s expenditure. For the UK that means a minimum of £42bn on pandemic planning and for the USA that would be $81bn. The UK’s commitment is greater than the combined costs of the London Olympics (£9bn), The Elizabeth Line (£18bn) and two Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers (£6bn each).

Ultimately, the systems have been ramped up for a repeated cycle of pandemic declarations followed by money flowing towards the WHO and the pharmaceutical industry, and away from causes where the money could have had a much bigger impact. Taxpayers’ money will be spent with no accountability, and there will be little control about how much is spent this way. If you do not want the UK trapped in this way then you need to educate your MP and fast. If the treaty is signed then only WHO decides.