The Mpox emergency
The World Health Organisation (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst among people who are suspicious of the WHO.
While the anxiety is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the International Health Regulations (IHR) Emergency Committee it has convened have little real power – it is simply following a script written by its sponsors. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions, but the problem we’re facing is much bigger than Mpox or WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox (inappropriately), is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents, such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness, to fever and muscle pains, to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades’, produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission, as well as other forms of close contact, such as within households, increasing their potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to lower prior immunity, as well as the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in the DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing MPox outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries involving a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in the DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15. In that same period, about 40,000 people in the DRC, mostly children under five, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to a lack of access to very basic commodities, like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs and mosquito nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if there are sufficient resources.
During the period in which 500 people died from Mpox in the DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in the DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of the DRC is also facing increasing instability characterised by mass rape and massacres, partly due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These, in turn, are needed to support the Green agenda of Europe and North America.
An industry produces what it is paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to flourish. The media would barely have mentioned the disease.
Now, the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. It has spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting, which is solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemics, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the IHR. While improving nutrition, sanitation and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures aren’t being prioritised. Rather, the WHO is pushing vaccines instead.
We now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes, non-governmental organisations, commercial companies and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding new markets for Big Pharma, purloining public funding and then developing and selling the cure for the disease de jour. The entire, newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the COVID-19 response, is based around this approach. Justification for the salaries of those involved requires them to detect outbreaks of diseases, exaggerating their likely impact and the organisation of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large pharma industries, pharma investors and pharma companies themselves – have the power to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the harms this approach is causing are hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in the DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who got rid of a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now deal with the wealth extractors of Big Pharma.
Dealing with the cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird Flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different from decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the COVID-19 outbreak showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by colonial regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalise dissent and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and aren’t disconnected from the WHO declaring the Mpox outbreak a PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew 20 years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of the DRC. If a mass vaccination programme is rolled out, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making is centralised far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those of the pandemic industry.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding in front of us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are doing the bidding of politicians and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonised. An anti-democratic agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs, such as the World Economic Forum, and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to protect democracy and guard against a resurgence of fascism. If we cannot see this, or if we can but don’t call it out, then we will have only ourselves to blame when things get even worse.
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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Beautifully expressed, Jack. I have a child your age and thank you for speaking up on his behalf.
Seconded…except my kiddo is still in primary school. Always enjoy reading Jack’s articles as it’s so important and insightful to hear from a kid’s perspective just how much this whole fiasco impacted them. Never ever to be repeated. :-/
A suggestion I feel like making here: Can we perhaps stop making a topic out of the age of this guy? He tends to write sensible stuff and that’s what matters. Compared to that, whether he’s 14 or 1400 isn’t important.
It’s the perspective that matters, as Mogwai rightly says. my year 9 certainly couldn’t write like that so it’s great that Jack can represent his generation so eloquently.
”The origin of all correlation is causality.” I like that and think I’ll start using it. Anyway, here is a recent research paper which shows a strong relationship between the death jabs and infection/mortality in Europe. Any data-heads in the house may want to scrutinise it further as it gets very technical so here’s the abstract;
”This report investigates short-term causal vaccine-mortality interactions during booster campaigns in 2022 in 30 European countries (population ~530M). An infection-vaccination-mortality model is introduced with causal aspects of repeatability, random chance, temporal order and confounding. The model is simple, has few or even zero prior model parameters and is unbiased in causal mechanisms and strengths. Confounders are taken into account explicitly of mortality-caused fear incentivizing vaccinations and four related to covid infections, and generically for all long-term confounding. Bayesian probabilities quantify all interactions, and from
observed weekly administered vaccine doses and all-cause mortality, mortality on short-term caused by a vaccination dose is estimated as Vaccine Fatality Ratio (VFR).”
#VFR results are 0.13% (0.05%-0.21%, 95% confidence interval) in The Netherlands and 0.35% (0.15%-0.55%) in Europe, subtantially transcending covid IFR. Additionally, sewer-viral-particle experiments suggested vaccination induces covid-infections and/or reactivates latent viral reservoirs.”
#The evidence of a causal relationship from vaccination to both infection and mortality is a very strong alarm signal to immediately stop current mass vaccination programmes.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368777703_Causal_effect_of_covid_vaccination_on_mortality_in_Europe
During the Covid years children were treated appallingly; our authorities most certainly took advantage of their ‘good nature’ and tolerance of authority.
IMO the worst aspect of this abuse was in the deliberate (and documented) use of peer pressure to force hesitant children to comply with state diktat (eg, in making peers socially isolate children who didn’t get a dose of vaccine) — this is deeply unethical and I can only hope that there is a review of the way in which psychological techniques were used to manipulate (relatively) innocent children.
Adults should be reminded that today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. It is always a mistake to treat children unfairly, as in time they’ll be making decisions on our behalf.
The way that children were treated was child abuse. I had regular training in child protection throughout my career, the frequency & quality of which decreased over time, it was emotional abuse & neglect.
Incredibly few professionals working with or advocating for children called it out for what it was. Abuse. Pure & simple.
Agreed. And delivered solely to support the fragile ego of an incompetent politician and the power trip of teaching union leaders. And none of the above will be called to account and suffer any sanctions for the suffering they caused. See you next Tuesdays the lot of them. A plague on all their houses.
Jack … this is a very well-written testimony to the damage done to a generation of schoolchildren by the egotistical idiots in Government. There is no justification for what was done to you and your cohorts.
However, I am very confident that you will “survive and thrive” and have a great career. Anyone who can write and express themselves so fluently at age 15 (or thereabouts) has a bright future.
Whilst I’m not trivialising the situation you have had to deal with, my late father who lived in a rural location in Hampshire, was age 13 when WW2 broke out. That’s when his education was permanently terminated …. he and the other older boys were needed to work on the farms, replacing the men who had been called up.
He continued to educate himself throughout his life.
What a sensible young man and well written. I wept just reading how that imbecile of a health minister has ruined so many young lives spuriously and idiotically.
Judging by the recent disgusting behaviour of those in our Parliament walking out during Andrew Bridgen‘s speech it would appear things haven’t changed much.
The really worrying thing is that governments are full of Hancocks.
My daughter dropped out from her degree in music technology because despite that her last year and a bit was supposed to be heavily biased towards practical work, she was told it was all going to be on-line and there would be no practical work due to covid. The course had already had less practical work than she expected and as the practical aspect was what she had hoped to be instructed in and was the reason she took the course, once this was eliminated from it, she saw no point in continuing with it. I imagine there are many similar cases in many courses that needed similar person to person interfaces, which became inadequate or not completed due to educational establishments following Hancock’s unnecessary restrictions.
Hancock and I agree about one thing: Teachers are lazy buggers who don’t want to work.