Gordon Brown's WHO Disinformation

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.