The World Health Organization has announced a dramatic reduction in the size of its leadership team from 14 to 7 people, along with budget cuts of 25 percent. It is dealing with a loss of funding from the withdrawal of the United States. The WHO will scramble to have private philanthropy and corporate donations make up the difference.
This is the kind of normal adjustment businesses and households make all the time. These cuts only take the organization back to pre-COVID times. But for the WHO, which has known forever growth in budget and power, this caused much wailing and frenzied cries about the end times.
Thus far, all these problems have been perceived and characterized as management and budgetary. The actual problem goes much deeper. It reaches to a philosophical level that became evident during the crisis of the last five years. In practical terms, there is the huge elephant in the room: the management of the pandemic.
At the very outset of global lockdowns, the WHO played the decisive role in ratifying mass coercion as the path to dealing with a new virus. It’s vision of “health” amounted to a wreckage of social and economic functioning around the world.
Many in leadership today deny it orchestrated lockdowns but we have all the receipts.
The WHO organized a trip to Wuhan by global health officials including representatives from the National Institutes of Health. The dates of this trip were Feb. 16–24, 2020.
The WHO sent the following judgment out to the entire world:
“In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history. The strategy that underpinned this containment effort was initially a national approach that promoted universal temperature monitoring, masking, and hand washing. However, as the outbreak evolved, and knowledge was gained, a science and risk-based approach was taken to tailor implementation.”
Can you imagine? They were sweeping people off the streets and welding people in their homes. The WHO endorsed this in the following way:
“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat.”
Further:
“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures—whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel. Throughout an intensive 9-days of site visits across China, in frank discussions from the level of local community mobilizers and frontline health care providers to top scientists, Governors and Mayors, the Joint Mission was struck by the sincerity and dedication that each brings to this COVID-19 response.”
Even rereading this just now and putting the text in this article, I’m still just floored that such a document was ever released. The United States signed onto this document. It was even written by a graduate of Stanford University who was and still is working for the WHO.
The document was blasted all over the world. The mainstream media loved it and urged all governments to comply. This was precisely the turning point in contemporary history. Suddenly the WHO had blessed totalitarianism as the path to public health.
Every country but just a handful (Sweden, Nicaragua, Tanzania) went along with it. Public health agencies urged all governments to go along. When people wondered why their schools, churches, and businesses were closed, the answer was that the authorities demanded it. When you asked the authorities, they would inevitably cite the WHO.
Even social media began to reflect the WHO’s demand. YouTube specifically said it would not allow any content on its platform that contradicted the WHO’s policy recommendations. That company is owned by Google, which gamed its search algorithms to match WHO priorities.
I asked a person very close to the events of the time, a scientist who was an outspoken critic of the entire lockdown-until-vaccination model of infectious disease control, what he thought of the WHO’s role. In particular, I asked him about the influence of the WHO’s Feb. 28, 2020, report. He responded that this report was the turning point and the single biggest influence on the government response.
The policies that followed ruined health worldwide, doomed many young people to illiteracy, boosted substance abuse, fed digital addiction, and demoralized billions of people who thought they had freedom and then discovered that they did not. Instead they realized that all their rights and freedoms are contingent and can be wholly taken away in a day.
Consider that the WHO was the driving force behind this catastrophe. And it did this in full cooperation with the CCP, as incredible as that seems.
Is it any wonder that the WHO is discredited? Given the global reaction against what happened, it only makes sense that all nations would fundamentally rethink their relationship with the organization.
Not only that: the top staff of the organization is even now populated by some of the key architects of the entire pandemic response. There have been no apologies but rather just the reverse. This is completely shameless.
The only question is what nations can do for themselves outside the World Health Organization. There is still a job to do at the national and local level. We need a completely new model for disease monitoring and treatment, in addition to a new focus on chronic disease, without a maniacal focus on pharmaceutical solutions to all things.
This is a huge and missing piece: What can nations do if they leave the WHO? That is still a missing piece of the puzzle.
That said, the WHO is not going away anytime soon, as much as it is no longer respected as a credible voice for health. Does it have a long-term hope for survival? I doubt it.
The WHO shares this in common with many once-respected institutions before the policy response to the new virus. There has not yet been a reckoning.
