Sarah awoke in pain again, alone on the mat, still reeking from the night before. She had not dreamed, not for months, that she could remember. Just waking with the pain inside her, the knowledge of her abandonment in the crowded house, and the emptiness that had been her future.
When the school closed ‘because of Covid’, Sarah’s father said it would just be a week, and she could help with the harvest. The fruit must be picked, anyway. When the harvest was coming in, the markets closed and it rotted in the store at the back of the house. The broker had forwarded the costs of her little brother’s medicines when he went to hospital three months earlier, and they were to pay him with the crop. Sarah’s father explained that college was no longer an option, and she did what she had to do. The man was old and she hated the smell and sight of him, but he had paid off the broker, and now Sarah owed him.
About 20 years ago, increased funding began flowing into international public health. This came mainly from a few private sources, people who had grown up in wealthy countries and made their fortunes from computer software. Their investment levered further funding from corporations and governments through ‘public-private partnerships’, adding public taxes to the private funder’s priorities. New foundations and non-government organisations paid people in poor countries to work on areas of public health that interested wealthy people. The World Health Organisation (WHO), formerly funded by countries as a technical agency, gained new ‘specified’ funding from these sources, co-opting the WHO’s vast network and influence to further the priorities of investors.
This new funding was a win-win for international public health (or ‘global health’). We got larger salaries and lots of travel, leading wealthier and more interesting lives. Improved resources for disease programs such as malaria and tuberculosis reduced avoidable sickness and death. Behind this, a few very rich people were deciding the health priorities of billions. They were not enabled by those whose health was at stake, but by those whose careers were at stake. Supporting the centralisation of public health has become standard, whilst simultaneously arguing for its decentralisation. Job security can paper over a lot of ills.
Private sponsors, and the pharma companies in whom they invest, give money for a reason. Corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders to maximise profits. Investors look to increase their own wealth. Where health outcomes seem more measurable, such as X number of vaccines saving Y number of children’s lives, media and public attention also helps build a positive image. Improved sanitation and community health worker support may be a better way to stop children dying, but the public don’t get excited by clinics and toilets.
Global health divided into two schools. One side continued to promote public health orthodoxy, prioritising high-burden diseases, local control and the importance of local economies to health. The 2019 WHO recommendations for pandemic influenza, for instance, point out that border closures, confinement of healthy people, and business closures should never be considered, as they would provide minimal benefit, further impoverish the poor, and cause net harm. The other school, far better funded, has been building a narrative that undefined health emergencies were an existential threat. They claim that these were best addressed by centralising control, confining populations and imposing externally mandated responses such as mass vaccination.
COVID-19 gave the opportunity for the new public health to prove itself. The response demonstrated that population control combined with mass injection could successfully concentrate wealth, whilst ensuring greater overall poverty and transmission of higher-burden diseases. Human rights could be put aside, the importance of education and functioning local economies could be ignored. It also proved that, when salaries and careers depend on it, most public health staff will comply, however contrary their orders may be to prior understanding or ethics. This has been demonstrated similarly in past generations. A whole new pandemic industry is now being built on this foundation.
As WHO and prominent foundations have noted, education was a path for girls and women in low-income countries to escape the cycle of poverty and child marriage. Millions of young women in such situations have no access to medical care without a husband’s consent, and consequently little access to contraception or basic gynaecological care for the harm done to young girls who are raped and abused. They essentially become slaves to their husband, who is usually far older. This is not new; UN agencies call it “an appalling violation of human rights and robs girls of their education, health and long-term prospects”. Those who ran the Covid response, including WHO and other UN agencies, made a conscious decision to force millions more women into this situation. This is important to understand.
Sarah had heard that people in rich countries have meetings to help people like her. She was taught in school about the Government’s efforts to stop female genital mutilation, or ‘FGM’ as the ritual her mother had endured was now called. Some people had given her class laptops because education was the key to making the family, the community and the country stronger. This would allow them to have less babies, more money and better health. This had made sense to Sarah and the world had looked brighter.
Sarah doesn’t see the other students much now. She heard the school had reopened, but most of her old classmates were pregnant or had babies, and like her they knew this promised world was not for them. She knows they are not stupid – they know the virus was mostly a problem for old people, and that the same rich people who once paid for the school computers made lots of money from the vaccines they insisted everyone have for the ‘old people’s virus’. They knew the white people who had come to the clinic were very rich in their own countries, although they tried to look poor in the village. But they had never realised that it was all a lie. Theirs had not been irrational dreams. Even the broker who lent the money to her father had morals and went to the mosque on Fridays.
While a conference in Geneva applauded its next speaker, another spasm of pain cut into Sarah in another and simpler room. This spasm seemed deeper. She could not think about these things anymore. Soon he would come back and she did not know how she would prepare his meal. Sarah knew a lot, about a lot of people, but that didn’t help.
Sarah is not a real person, but she is also one of very many who we have abandoned and betrayed over the past few years. UNICEF estimates that up to 10 million additional girls will suffer in this way because of what was done in response to COVID-19.
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.
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Why weren’t mummy and daddy forced to repay the £10,000 damage to the picture frame?
Because the miscreants are adults, at least in terms of age.
I don’t like exemplary sentences.
Two years for wrecking a frame that cost $10,000 and can be easily replaced seems excessive. Replacing the value, a fine and community service would do.
(And for the avoidance of doubt I think JSO activists are as idiotic as their cause.)
It’s a strange world really though. I come back to the horrible things that people in authority do to others on a regular basis, sometimes quite knowingly. Like the invasion of Iraq or the untold damage done during the covid madness.
We definitely live in a multi tiered justice system. The more senior a position of authority you have, the more damage and destruction you can get away with.
You would definitely put and stop to the endless expansion of the state if people in authority would be made to pay for the consequences of their actions.
I am sure there are many like me who applaud the sentences.
The actual value of the damaged propery should be irrelevant. The tariffs for sentencing (the guidlines for judges) to not have a monetary value attached.
Agreed, and I agree with the below comment. It’s not like they’ll even serve all of that time anyway. Meanwhile, my bigger concern is that the UK ( and elsewhere, seemingly ) has a society that is trying to normalize paedophilia. Look at the non-sentences doled out for those caught with child sex abuse images as a comparison. These people get to go about their lives, rub shoulders with decent people, nobody’s checking if they’re keeping a distance from children ( Christ, some of them have children! ) and try their level best not to get caught next time, because this isn’t something that you can just shut off in your brain;
”Two years for the very personification of entitled moronism.
For the first time in her life there are consequences to her actions. It’s… what’s the word I’m looking for? I know: DELICIOUS.
It’s tough way to grow up – but you’ve earned every single second. Your parents should be slopping out with you.”
https://x.com/KiszelyPhilip/status/1839673198142455981
But this Pheobe person is doing this stuff all of the time. When does it become necessary to stop these people? After one incident like this or after 20 incidents. The justice system has actually been very lenient with these people.
Why can’t we just leave these people glued to the wall? Let’s see how they would feel after a few days.
Exactly. Certainly my preferred way of dealing with these Next Tuesdays.
Or glue them together… because if you can’t beat them, join them!
But seriously though that is not a bad idea. They are suggesting that it is our collective responsibility to save the planet by eradicating fossil fuels and and plunging ourselves into the dark ages. So whose responsibility is it to unglue them from the wall? Let the museum close and they can spend the night. If our oil usage has consequences, then so do your tomato soup and glue fetishes.
Maybe after a few days somebody could bring them some soup!
Their cause to many sounds noble and getting rid of fossil fuels sounds plausible. But actually it is not noble to deny the third world fossil fuels that would alleviate their misery and it is not plausible to be rid of fossil fuels since they supply 85% of the worlds energy. ——–So their cause is one based entirely on faith and emotion rather than fact and reason. I blame government and a compliant media for having brainwashed these easily manipulated people into thinking there is a climate apocalypse just around the corner, when infact there is no evidence that CO2 from fossil fuels use is causing or will cause dangerous changes to climate.
imagine the smell.
Hmm. Could enter them into the Turner Prize?
Or maybe Lego could bring out new enviro sets from various scenes from all this. A couple of Lego characters with hands stuck to a road blocking a Lego Ambulance? Oh! wait…
https://toybook.com/lego-sustainability-news/
Such as this
With people crawling all over the tanker and fiddling with it, where’s the explosion?
Let us remember, back in 2008, when Hedge Fund Billionaire Jeremy Grantham set up the Grantham Research Unit Climate Fraud outfit, including Mega Liar Bob Ward, PhD (failed).
Ward became famed as “fast fingers Ward” and was the go-to guy for all the MSM in their Reality-Denier scams.
Of course, Grantham then had, and very likely still has a portfolio of oil firms.
He also set on our old chum Neil (Professor Pantsdown) Ferguson. The Pandemic and general medical prognosticator that has never been less than one order of magnitude exaggerating risk and outshone himself in some “five orders of magnitude” super scares.
The very bloke who was chosen by the blue arse cheek of the Uniparty to help Stalin’s Nanny Susan Michie in her agit prop nudging.
Now elevated to the WHO, together with Welcome Trust’s Jeremy Farrar.
So, are Grantham (and Kyte) somehow to be considered ax Big Oil people?
Well in some sense. I’m certain that Grantham and his chums are bright enough to have no doubt that Net Zero is bollox on stilts.
But destroying coal in the UK (obviously not in China, India, Indonesia etc.) was a good move in boosting the value of his oil stocks. Gas will be next to be destroyed and Ed Milibrain (of Climate Change Act 2008 again) is now facilitating this endgame).
And destroying Western Economies is the ultimate aim.anyway, as Christina Figueres has confirmed.
That tin of tomato soup could have gone to a food bank. What a bunch of degenerates!
Throwing food around is what toddlers do in high-chairs.
Vastly over-rated. Heinz soup and the picture. That said, it’s damage to someone’s property so whatever the law says for that.
I think MajorMajor has it right: Leave them there. Just to make sure nobody assaults them put some sort of barrier around them (which might accidentality also mean that none of their mates could come along and free them). I also think that’s what should be done when people glue themselves to the road – a few bollards and a hi-vis tarpaulin to try to make sure nobody runs them over – then get the traffic moving around them. Similar for the M25 gantry protests – a quick net fixed underneath and then get the traffic moving again.
Activism is all well and good. If there is injustice that is clear by all means, We often hear the supporters of JSO and Extinction Rebellion etc compare them to the Suffragettes, but these people were protesting about rights for women and the vote. But it was crystal clear that women were not being allowed the vote. Climate Change being caused by the use of fossil fuels is not so clear. It is riddled with uncertainty and is always a question of degree. There has to be an evaluation of cost/benefit and the benefit of fossil fuels is clear. They have brought billions of people out of abject poverty, and this is the part of the equation that JSO etc simply do not accept, basically because they understand virtually nothing about how energy works. So we cannot have energy policy based on faith and emotion, and there comes a point where the activism goes too far all based on irrational fear. These climate activists are starting to go too far and they must be nipped in the bud before people get seriously hurt or worse.
The issue of votes for women was not at all clear. As late as 1917 many working class men did not have the vote either – it wasn’t just women who were not enfranchised. And much of the opposition to votes for women came from women themselves.
Judge Christopher Hehir…told the activists to come to court “prepared in practical and emotional terms to go to prison…”
Many years ago, at a time when UK football hooliganism was world news, a taxi driver in Singapore took me on a tour, and drew up outside a large grim 19th-century brick building. It was Changi jail. ‘No hooliganism in Singapore,’ he stated with a proud air. ‘You get the cane here, you don’t sit down for six months.’
With our prisons full, and offenders undeterred by the thought of a little comfy custody at the public expense, maybe it’s time to look East and rediscover how we used to deal with juvenile delinquents. Maybe Judge Hehir should have told the soup-flingers to prepare not to sit down for 6 months.
We obviously need to heed their great wisdom and knowledge. They have shown us such great incites into the abyss the world is headed into if we do not stop using oil. So young to know so much. What really drives them is their narcissistic egos looking for attention and purpose. We can only hope they grow up some day, but living in their urban protected group think bubbles, there is doubt they will.