International organisations that facilitate an exchange of ideas and data are a global good. However, when these organisations begin to dictate what citizens within a country can and cannot do, they have become something quite different. No self-respecting totalitarian dictatorship would ever allow such interference with its own rule, whilst no rational democracy would countenance outsourcing its governance to others. Enthusiasm for such an institution could only come from national leaders who are working for other interests or capable of being coerced.
North Korea (or the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Korea), a dictatorship run by four generations of the Kim family and known for concentration camps and a habit of executing senior officials, has just commenced a three-year term on the Executive Board of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Nations from different regions of WHO take their turn, and it’s North Korea’s turn on behalf of the Southeast Asia Region. WHO does not pretend to be a bastion of democracy and human rights; the Director-General of WHO was a former minister in a dictatorial government that is accused of human rights abuses. Saudi Arabia’s co-chair of WHO’s Working Group on the International Health Regulations (WGIHR) recently stated that greater restrictions on human rights are appropriate when WHO thinks it necessary. So North Korea holding such influence is not something unusual. As WHO represents all of its 194 Member States, each country should have a turn helping to run things, just as large countries like China and India should have a commensurate influence on its decisions.
The critical point is that, as democracies, we should treat recommendations arising from such a body in this light, and ignore them unless they are fully in line with our own interests.
Over the next two years, relationships with WHO will change. Assuming the proposed reforms to pandemic agreements go through, states will have “undertaken” to follow all future recommendations (Article 1, new art. 13A) from the Director-General regarding the management of health emergencies, whenever he or she decides that something within the biosphere might pose a threat. A massive surveillance programme, costing more than three times the WHO’s current annual budget, will ensure such threats are found – whether they are really there or, more likely, not. States will need to have actively rejected proposed amendments to WHO’s International Health Regulations or the Director-General’s dictates will have legal force under international law. Alternatively they can leave the WHO altogether. As this takes over a year, such action would have to start soon.
In two years’ time, when the IHR amendments come into force, this organisation directed by a combination of dictatorial regimes, Western bureaucrats and corporate and private sponsors will be telling we-the-people whether we can work, see our families or travel. It will tell us when we must be confined, examined, tested and injected (Article 18). States will have “undertaken” to follow a long list of other directives that the Director-General will dictate and to suppress our disagreement should we complain (amendment to Article 33).
Who gains from this?
We can at least rest assured that the Kim family ruling North Korea has no intention of being told how its people should be managed, next time a bunch of Swiss-based careerists conjure up an existential threat to their well-being. They, we can presume, realise that people paid to find threats will find them, and they can read, so they know that actual ‘pandemics’ are rare and have low impact. But they do have an obvious interest in Western societies buying into this and watching us go down the drain.
The pandemic agenda is not a problem for countries such as North Korea or China, where people’s freedom is already at the will of their Government. But it is anathema for countries where government supposedly exists on the will of the people. So why do our leaders go along with this? Klaus Schwab, the Chair of the World Economic Forum, boasts it is because his organisation has “penetrated” our cabinets. Many current and recent Western leaders, after all, are alumni of his school for compliance, the Young Global Leaders Forum. The benefits his members gained from the Covid response seem to have validated his corporate-authoritarian model. Whatever the source of the authoritarian groupthink gripping the current crop of global elites, toeing the line is plainly well-rewarded.
Do enough people care enough to stop it? Maintaining one’s rights takes effort and an element of risk, including risk for family and friends, as many in North Korea know well. Ignorance, compliance and subservience are easier, at least for a while. Bodily autonomy is a handy catch cry to defy the ‘Right-wing’ and religious, but inconvenient when it impedes the agenda of billionaire ‘progressives’. The ‘greater good’ is always there to excuse any necessary trampling of rights.
Alternatively, we could decide to take charge of our own lives, our own healthcare and our own countries. We could decide that the former wisdom of public health – that community-based decision making is vital and responses should always be tailored to local need – still makes sense.
In the end, it is immaterial whether North Korea is on the WHO Executive Board. If WHO was simply there to be called on when needed, and its advice was of the take-it-or-leave-it kind, then all countries should have their turn. If we now decide WHO should dictate how we manage basic challenges in our lives then we will just have to face what comes from that. Compared to the forces within our own institutions that we are allowing to subvert our democracies through this perpetual emergency agenda, a small East Asian dictatorship taking its turn in an organisation it intends to ignore is barely relevant.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
The problem with the WHO is that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and (The Bill Gates funded) GAVI are its chief funding source(s).
Therefore Gates’ agenda of Global vaccine rollout and digital compliance becomes the WHO’s agenda, and Gates will become the principle beneficiary of this initiative as the software used in digital ID (see ID2020) is created by Microsoft.
In the early months of the ‘pandemic’ there were a number of video conferences involving Bill where for some reason he was the ‘go to’ person for advice on pandemics. On one he held up a hand written sign saying ‘work from home’ and on another he expressed his pleasure at how well MS Teams was working.
It’s also worth remembering that not long before the pandemic, the media, particularly the BBC, gave air-time to environmental activists that were demanding we all work from home to ‘save the planet’.
“As WHO represents all of its 194 Member States, each country should have a turn helping to run things, just as large countries like China and India should have a commensurate influence on its decisions.”
No merit of skill then?
Perhaps we should adopt the same principle when flying, so that each passenger has a turn at flying the plane?
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.
They are looking out for their careers all the time. If their personal interests and those of the people are aligned, great. If they aren’t, then you can be sure that their personal interests will prevail.
Any leader who stands up to a major global bureaucracy these days is signing away all their career prospects going forward.
If throwing national sovereignty is required to advance or protect their careers, so be it.
They have plenty of bogus but plausible arguments to defend their self interested positions. That’s not hard at all.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Thomas Sowell
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
Thomas Sowell
Great stuff from Sowell, as always.
However, it’s slightly outdated, I think.
To me, public office these days seems like a stepping stone to lucrative positions in corporations or NGOs. The power of public office may not be the ultimate goal or ambition any more.
It’s a continuation of the aims of people like Jean Monnet who was one of the founders of what is now the EU, a supranational organisation run by people who no longer need to be elected and take decisions without any interest in the people who are no longer asked to vote for them and their policies.
And to further clarify where politicians sit:
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
Wrong. The primary concern of national leaders is like everyone else’s: themselves.”
I think both these statements can be true. Politicians are obviously working for themselves. They are meant to work for us. But in order to advance their own interests they may choose to align themselves with other groups or movements. I think you’ve kind of made this case yourself in your reply below. What we don’t 100% know is whether some of them believe some of the claptrap they spout.
I reckon they do. Most of us believe what is convenient for us to believe.
I don’t believe very much in the archetyoe of the movie villain who is comically devoid of conscience or compassion and gets perverse pleasure from being evil.
I expect you are right. The capacity for doublethink is probably a necessity for most of them.
I think this is why we should be very suspicious of anyone that tries to impose things on us “for our own good”. They are much more dangerous than obvious thugs or crooks.
A good article, and a well made point. It doesn’t matter, at all, that North Korea has rotated around to being on the board….anyone saying anything about the fact that they are on the committee with Afghanistan, Cameroon and Belarus….?
The worrying thing, as others will point out, is the 80% Bill and Melinda funding…the BigPharma funding, the disproportionate influence of different countries..and no doubt many other things….. the fact that this supranatural, unelected body, is being given power over the health of ‘the world’ is tremendously worrying.
I don’t doubt we would all have had to be jabbed for monkeypox if they had had the power they are now seeking..and been given….that is our future..
“On the 5th of this month The European Commission and WHO launch landmark digital health initiative to strengthen global health security”…..THIS is the problem….the unelected insane asylum calling itself the EU …willing to hand over everything to another unelected set of nutters..while we seem to be able to do very little about it..
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-06-2023-the-european-commission-and-who-launch-landmark-digital-health-initiative-to-strengthen-global-health-security
The EU has been planning vaccine passports for over a decade. The timeline for rollout started in 2018.
https://health.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2022-12/2019-2022_roadmap_en.pdf
It would be a mistake to assume that the EU and WHO haven’t been collaborating for a very long time.
It depends what they actually mean by the term “vaccine passport” and how it would be used. It’s not a new idea to have personal records on a portable device for such items that could be useful. However, when I started using one (in 1996) it was just a printed A6 booklet made by one of the Pharma firms, and all hand written form entries. It has a list of all the known products at the time, and a few blank rows etc. Names of products used, dates administered, and recommended renewals etc.
I did actually carry it alongside my British Passport, in case it could have been useful on some global trips, but that isn’t the same thing as having to do so for any other reason.
Having hand written medical information is not a problem because it’s voluntary and is not recorded in official databases.
Once it is a digital record, connected to your social credit score, you’re on the hook and you will never be allowed to wriggle off.
With North Korea in the board, perhaps they can be blamed for bad decisions if there is significant complaint against the WHO.
It’s both things that are a problem, North Korea being involved on the board is bad in itself, it’s made worse by the abdication of responsibility for using our own brain cells on the part of western governments.
Freedoms were paid for with the blood of our forbears, the WHO has plenty to do with genuinely severe disease problems, it doesn’t need to declare a lockdown for a new sniffle, but it will because that’s easy and visible while the hard work is not and there is much less press coverage.
Don’t worry our Government won’t sign up to anything that would infringe the democracy we think we’ve got !
Governments, or at least the powers pulling the strings behind them, of Communist dictatorships and the freer states of the world perhaps have more in common that many would like to believe. Governments have always used fear to control populations, presenting themselves as virtuous defenders against some great evil, which they frequently had a hand in creating. Lockdowns and associated restrictions, under the pretext of protecting people from the threat of a virus (or maybe another virus or maybe Climate Change or maybe Institutionalised Racism or maybe Transphobia or maybe Russia or maybe yet another virus), provided a powerful control mechanism for suppressing dissent and controlling capital flows in the inevitable collapse of the debt-based monetary system, a collapse resulting from demographic decline and sheer weight of fraud. But ultimately they only delayed the inevitable: as the financial collapse is now upon us, the truth is becoming harder and harder to conceal.
Fully agree with your comments.
However, the fact that North Korea (as well as some other suspects) is now on the executive board should be a red flag.
I have been actively fighting against these new WHO proposals. Most people don’t have a clue this is happening. At what point will people engage? How far can people be pushed before something awakens?
Will it be a single incident which changes the dynamics or will it be a slow realisation?