Dr. David Bell on Public Health and ‘International Faciscm’

The public health physician discusses irrational COVID measures and the increasing concentration of power in totalitarian global institutions.

Dr. David Bell, a senior scholar at Brownstone Institute, a public health physician, and a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization, in Connecticut on Sep. 9, 2023. Patrick Mauler/The Epoch Times

Many people think COVID-19 has gone away and life is returning to normal, but when it comes to international public health agencies, this is not the case at all, says a public health physician and former World Health Organization (WHO) medical officer.

Instead, we’re seeing the building and expansion of institutions centered around so-called pandemic preparedness, according to Dr. Bell, speaking to EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders“ program.

One example is a WHO document, published in April 2022, titled, “Strengthening WHO Preparedness For and Response to Health Emergencies.” The document contains proposals for changes to the International Health Regulations (IHR) that were subsequently amended.

Negotiations to amend the regulations further in anticipation of the next pandemic are continuing, according to an Oct. 7 WHO press release, with 300 proposed amendments on the table.

The press release noted that “The IHR are an instrument of international law that is legally-binding on 196 State Parties, including the 194 WHO Member States.”

The Re-emergence of Fascism

Dr. Bell recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology titled “Pandemic Preparedness and the Road to International Fascism.”

In writing the paper, Dr. Bell said he hopes to get the public health world to step back and really think about what it’s doing, “because they’ve repeatedly done huge harm to society over the last couple of hundred years. And it is clear that they’re on that path again.”

The WHO came into being in 1948, but it was a culmination of international health efforts that began almost a century earlier, with the International Sanitary Conference in Paris in 1851.

Dr. Bell called the tactics used by the government and the media to promote vaccination mandates “a classic fascist approach.”

However, he stressed that “this is not new.” He traced the history of these types of tactics back to the era of colonialism, when “public health played a large role in justifying the takeover of populations in the colonial empires of Europe,” and on to the eugenics era of the 1920s and 1930s—a time when fascism in Germany and Italy worked hand in hand with medicine.

The first step in a fascist framework—like the one that is in place today, according to Dr. Bell—is a close cooperation between large corporations and governments. An example is the involvement of Microsoft’s Bill Gates with vaccine manufacturers, who in turn are cooperating with governments.

Fascist characteristics were seen in the technocracy and eugenics movements of the early 20th century, Dr. Bell said.

The technocracy movement was a social movement active in the 1930s that favored government by technocrats—elite experts—as opposed to representative government.

Eugenics

Similarly, eugenics is a field of study based on “the thought that all people are not equal, but you have an elite that will manage the rest for the greater good,” as Dr. Bell describes it. The elite, he added, is usually a corporate–government elite.

Eugenics fell from favor in the decades after World War II because of its connection to Hitler’s Third Reich.

However, it was considered mainstream science in the 1920s and 1930s in North America. Institutions like the prestigious John Hopkins School of Public Health included eugenics as a field of study, and respected scientists threw their weight behind the theory.

“We associate fascism with the idea of black and white photos of people in jackboots, but in the 20s and 30s this was the progressive way forward, pushed by the large corporations and by high levels of government, by certain professions,” Dr. Bell said.

According to a 1989 paper by Garland E. Allen, a leader in the history of genetics and eugenics:

“Eugenics was an attempt to use science (the newly discovered Mendelian laws of heredity) to solve social problems (crime, alcoholism, prostitution, rebelliousness), using trained experts. Eugenics gained much support from progressive reform thinkers, who sought to plan social development using expert knowledge in both the social and natural sciences.”

Eugenics was a very attractive idea, Mr. Bell said, because it allowed the experts to decide what the masses should do. Unfortunately, it led to policies like the forced sterilization of people considered inferior.

Unlike the scientific interventions and experiments done by the Nazis and later decried by the Western world, compulsory sterilization was a mainstream idea in public health in North America. Over thirty states adopted compulsory sterilization laws, leading to the sterilization of tens of thousands of women who were considered unfit to be parents.

Today these policies are considered inhumane. At the time, however, eugenics was thought to be progressive. It was promoted and backed by the wealthy elite, including the affluent supporters of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a leading proponent of eugenics.

Dr. Bell drew a parallel with the progressive left-wing ideologies of today. While communism is usually considered far-left and progressive, and fascism is associated with the far-right, Dr. Bell recalled that before World War II, fascism was actually seen as a progressive movement. Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler Man of the Year in 1938. Nazis were also socialists, with “Nazi” being an acronym for the National Socialist Party. “In the end, it is a totalitarian approach,” like communism, Dr. Bell said.

‘A Fallacy With No Historical Basis’

The idea that pandemics are automatically an existential threat is a fallacy, Dr. Bell said, and they were not thought to be so just a few years ago. “We pretend we do not have defenses against viruses,” and yet, vitamin D—as just one example—improves immune function to successfully fight off viruses, he said.

For many people, COVID-19 was no more potentially lethal than the flu, Dr. Bell said. He also noted that sometimes the standard treatment appeared to be more lethal than the disease, noting that nine out of ten patients who were put on ventilators died. That shouldn’t be surprising, he said, because “if you have frail old people who have respiratory disease and then you intubate and paralyze them, there’s a very high mortality rate.”

While he acknowledged that COVID-19 was “a significant disease,” it was significant mainly for the elderly and people who had co-morbidities.

“This virus was doing far less harm than a whole range of other diseases that we normally cope with every day,” he noted.

White papers from WHO and other agencies “state categorically ... that pandemics are becoming more frequent and more severe,” Dr. Bell said. “It’s a fallacy, it’s wrong, and it has no historical basis.”

And yet, “If you tell a lie enough times, people will believe it.”

A small number of people are benefiting from the pandemic hype, Dr. Bell said, whereas most are “being impoverished and losing their basic human rights in this process.”

A Pool of Bureaucrats With Global Power

The WHO is not a pool of expertise, but is instead “a pool of bureaucrats,” Dr. Bell said, which exists to coordinate certain aspects of health internationally. In a democratic society, that organization would not be allowed to have power.

It’s illogical to give more power to such organizations, he said. Based on their track record with COVID-19, they don’t understand the burden that lockdown policies place on students, young people, and the job market, nor the interrelation between them. For example, closing schools and depriving millions of students of education produces more poverty, and poverty produces poorer public health in the long term.

The United States has much more expertise than the WHO’s bureaucracy on infectious disease within its own borders, Dr. Bell said.

In the end, it all boils down to a totalitarian approach, he said. It’s an approach that does not let people in a society live like sovereign individuals with a government that exists to serve them, but vice versa.

A change can come about, Dr. Bell said, if people act on what they believe—if they start recognizing what is happening for what it is and acting on that acknowledgment. “Acting on it” can be as simple as not complying with stupidity, he said.