Gordon Brown, former British Chancellor and Prime Minister, wrote an unsurprising opinion piece in the Telegraph on May 17th 2024 endorsing the as yet unfinished World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Pandemic Agreement. This will be subject to a vote at the World Health Assembly in a little over a week’s time. Countries have less than two weeks to review the final version of this legally binding agreement and its potential effects on their health systems, economies, human rights and independence. It was supposed to have been delivered on March 29th. Of note, Mr. Brown overlooked to mention in his article the parallel vote on proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations, which he is presumably aware refutes many of the claims in his article.
The former politician rightly notes the terrible losses incurred during COVID-19. Alongside deaths linked to the virus itself – at an average age of over 80 years in most Western countries – was the deadly impact of the devastating economic losses as businesses, schools and supply lines were closed globally in an unprecedentedly homogenous global response. UNICEF estimated 228,000 children died in 2020 in South Asia from the response alone, and an additional 10 million girls will be forced into child marriage and all that entails. WHO estimated an additional 150 million people pushed into hunger, while malaria and tuberculosis mortality rose.
Mr. Brown is advocating that the world agree to similarly centralised and draconian responses to all future declared pandemics, and threats thereof, without waiting for a review on whether such measures actually caused, rather than mitigated, this disaster. Perhaps if WHO had kept to its pre-COVID-19 advice for respiratory virus pandemics of keeping borders open, people free from confinement and limiting workplace closures to protect low-income people things may have gone better. But abandonment of such orthodoxy remain unexplained.
Similarly, Brown bemoans the lack of vaccination in low-income countries where poor people with high rates of HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition but very low rates of severe COVID-19 frequently went unvaccinated. The failed COVAX programme to which he refers set out to vaccinate 75% of people in sub-Saharan Africa, in full knowledge that half this population were under 20 years of age while just 1% were over-75 and at significant risk from COVID-19. He may be unaware though, that WHO also undertook a study published in the third quarter of 2021, before Omicron ‘vaccinated’ the world’s population, showing that two thirds of Africans already had detectable SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, thus making additional vaccination of little benefit. The resource diversion of almost $10 billion associated with this programme, three times the annual budget for malaria, could not logically have provided overall benefit.
Gordon Brown claims that the Pandemic Agreement never at any stage allowed WHO to enforce population-wide vaccination, mask mandates and lockdowns. This is correct, as these provisions were in the IHR amendments, which the Pandemic Agreement states complement and are compatible with the Agreement itself. The version of this prior to April 2024 did precisely that, with countries undertaking to follow the Director General’s recommendations, explicitly including mandated vaccines, border closures and quarantine. It may be that Mr. Brown did not read this.
In contending that it is false that 20% of commodities can be demanded by the WHO, Mr. Brown appears to recognise that something related to this was indeed in drafts of the Pandemic Agreement (Article 12.4.b: 10% of commodities to be provided free and 10% at cost price). So rather than working directly from the text, he quotes as evidence a clearly misleading statement from the U.K. Government Minister responsible.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the entire debacle around the WHO’s pandemic accords is this misinformation that is so frequently accompanying them. The urgency and risk of pandemics has been shown to be grossly misrepresented by WHO, the World Bank and G20 High Level Independent Panel, based on their own sources of evidence. COVID-19, quoted as a further justification, is now widely accepted to have arisen through gain of function research – a result of reckless approaches to pandemic prevention rather than of natural risk. A further report from the University of Leeds recently demonstrated that the financing required to address these proposals is equivalent to 25% to 50% of total global overseas development assistance for health – an unfeasible number the magnitude of which should not be lost upon a former Chancellor.
If this Pandemic Agreement and the accompanying but overlooked IHR amendments are indeed crucial to us all, then perhaps countries need more than a few days to review them. Article 55(2) of the IHR requires four months review time, while the Pandemic Agreement was supposed to be delivered before the end of March. Both of these agreements, intended to be legally binding on states, are still under negotiation within two weeks of a vote. A more measured approach for Brown would involve supporting those calling for a postponement until obvious deficiencies are addressed and the reforms are placed on an evidence-based footing, allowing countries to assess their far-ranging implications. That would be good global governance. One hopes the former Chancellor, who previously called for a global Government with executive powers to manage the COVID-19 outbreak, would agree.
Whilst Mr. Brown does not consider handing decision-making powers currently vested in individuals and national government to an organisation a quarter privately funded, and overseen by an assembly including geopolitical rivals of the U.K., to be a sovereignty issue, other well placed people disagree. These include 49 U.S. Senators, the Dutch Parliament and the Slovak Prime Minister. Like many, the former Chancellor may be having difficulty in distinguishing misinformation from truth. This may be why trust, of such importance to governments and public health, is being lost by both.
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 Director of the Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in the USA, 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 Senior Scholar at the Brownstone Institute.
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No scientist would ever use the term climate emergency, it’s entirely political.
Or utter the word “consensus”.
Consistently excellent articles from Mr Morrison.
Very interesting. Thank you very much.
I’m 61.
If the climate had changed since I was a nipper I’m sure I’d have noticed .
I am going tobe 62 this month and I cant see any difference either !!
Same here, early ’60s … climate hasn’t changed in my lifetime.
Mid 60’s and ditto.
Mid ’70s and ditto
Same here. Over the years, there have been quite a few weather events, but climate variation appears to be normal. I can just about remember one winter, which must have been 1962/3, and summer 1976, and a few others. Many of the changes where I live are more to do with urban development, not meteorological changes, though – e.g. minimum temperature on cold nights.
“In fact, a slightly warmer and wetter planet and a little extra CO2 seem to have done wonders for global crop yields.”
Huh? But the crops are all dying. Ah wait.. they’re banning fertiliser to create food shortages they can blame on the ‘climate emergency’. I get it now.
When they say they want to get rid of carbon, they mean you and me.
And the rest of life on Earth, it all being carbon-based…
‘Climate Emergency’ has nothing to do with the climate.
I think that should be pretty obvious by now, but it seems 90% of the world is brainwashed with this nonsense, some to the point of it being a religious experience. There are also lots of people who need this to be true because its how they earn their living, or run their business. They aren’t interested in a reasonable case against their beliefs. They didn’t use reason to formulate their beliefs. Reason will not change their thinking.
Then we have the Great Resetters who have to have a nice fat excuse for all the horrors they are foisting on us, and this one is perfect. ‘Save the world..!’ Just let us tax you to the hilt, and I’m sure it will all be alright. What a load of cobblers.
But Greta said –
We MUST note this properly documented observation: That emissivity (the gas property that is supposedly responsible for ‘trapping’ heat) does not trap heat at all. It’s a measure of how fast a gas can absorb heat and is a zero-sum game. If it absorbs faster it also EMITS faster at equilibrium temperature and emissivity is not a factor in that temperature (Kirchoff’s law of thermal radiation – at equilibrium temperature, emission=absorption). See page 14 of the document linked below
That’s the reason there’s no human-forced climate change. Fill the entire atmosphere with Co2 if you like and it won’t make a jot of different to the climate. (Mars is 95% Co2. It can lose 100 degrees of temperature overnight. Why ? Because the atmosphere is THINNER and no Co2 ‘greenhouse effect’ does anything to offset that. It’s atmospheric density that traps heat and the relevant thermodynamic property is SPECIFIC HEAT CAPACITY).
Earth atmospheric Co2 is 4 hundredths of 1 percent !
See this document where it’s all worked out by a gas turbine engineer – someone who actually understands thermodynamics. Observed temperatures are all accounted for without recourse to any Co2 ‘trapping. If you don’t read the whole document at least see PAGE 14:
https://gvigurs.wordpress.com/2019/04/28/the-emperors-new-climate/
So far, so good, but it’s more complex than that. E.g. local temperature is strongly related to wind direction (when there is any), and cloud cover, which reduces thermal loss from the ground after dark, leading to frost. Quite rapid variations like that are noticeable when you are inland far enough, compared with being near the coast.
It’s not more complex than that. The document calculates the two reference temperatures based on the available solar heat flux: surface temperature and atmospheric radiative equilibrium.
These are the “controls” if you like for everything, including the kind of physical phenomena you describe.
The discontinuity in the two reference temperatures is accounted for by physical activity in the tropopause which is analysed in detail in the document which derives the atmospheric temperature lapse rate from first principles and accounts for the existence of the tropopause within which all “weather” (including the phenomena you describe) is to be found.
The radiative equilibrium temperature is then found above the tropopause in the stratosphere which is isothermic (demonstrating the veracity of the equation shown on Page 14). It also notes that the stratosphere is found at the same pressure level on other planets and moons of planets having an atmosphere.
There’s no role for emissivity in all of this – as I say it’s a zero sum game. The constituents of the atmosphere have very little to say, it’s rather about atmospheric thickness (density).
Spot on petro, but tell that to ‘the masses’ who fell for the COVID nonsense, the Lockdown lunacy, the VAX and multi vax farce, the Ukraine Russia war by proxy and on and on and on, and who will continue to worship at the altar of mendacity.
Over time the truth will prevail. It simply isn’t possible to sustain such basic scientific fraud forever because it’s in the interests of everybody (even ultimately the elite “fraudsters”) to take advantage of the real characteristics of natural phenomena. The greenhouse effect is on very thin ice now due to the amount of time past with nothing happening and, in particular, its single point of failure described in that document above.
i.e.
A: the fact that the gas property of “emissivity” is not a factor in the radiative equilibrium temperature and
B: that the atmospheric reference temperatures (surface and atmospheric radiative equilibrium at the stratosphere) can be accounted for without recourse to some voodoo “trapping” effect beyond the heat capacity of said gas
Is the snowball starting to roll downhill? We will know it has when the BBC permits free and open discussion of climate on its airwaves.
It’ll never happen. Hell will never freeze over.
“For the period 1961-2019, maize, rice, soyabean and wheat global average yields are reported to have grown every year by 3.3%, 2.4%, 2.6% and 3.8% respectively.”
source please, Mr. Morrison.
Repeating the good that co2 does in being turned into carbohydrates by plants might eventually get through to people how stupid, – evil, really, – decarbonisation policies are.
limate Crisis In The Australian Alps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz5e-gKV8qI
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The IPCC reports have been misleading for decades. The summaries say that they are “90% confident that human activity is changing the climate” but in all the main studies and reports, a phrase search of ‘90% confidence’ shows that “we are 90% confident that temperature is changing the climate”.
I have been trying to tell anyone who will listen, but am always ignored by those with self interest, or who can’t believe such a simple mistake.
Not a series of documents (the summaries) that have any credibility…
I just looked up this article with the intention of sharing it with a friend, to back up the comments I made last night. Lucky I thought to click through to the source material – the paper now appears with « Retracted » on every page. What has happened? Why was the paper retracted. Not a good look for me.