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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“Englishness is a bit like crap journalism: we can’t define it, but we know when we are in its presence.”
I love that phrase and will be using it in future.
A great article.
Yes.
I find that people on the Left yearn for rules by which other people should live their lives. They get angry when those people don’t follow those rules and remark that this is the source of all our problems – other people not following the rules. For these types, the role of government is to write rules and to enforce them.
The Left is generally unable even to contemplate the possibility that there are many shades of grey.
The Left is generally uncomfortable with the glorious ambiguity which is the human condition.
Last week in the office I asked a Lefty type (who proudly and haughtily told me that he voted Labour, apparently for the sole reason that he doesn’t like the nasty tories, yawn) how two people, a loaf to share between them, should ensure that neither side feels unfairly treated. He immediately suggested that they should employ a third party to decide the matter. When I suggested that the best way was for one to cut the loaf and the other to chose which of the two pieces to take, I watched his head explode. It seemed he had never considered the possibility that there may be a way for people to cooperate without external authority forcing them into an “accord”.
Ah well. I offered him some of my Quality Street. He hasn’t talked to me since.
At which point they had to split the loaf three ways.
40:30:30 I expect!
Who’s responsible for the slow-mo destruction of Britain, across all contexts, again? What does the evidence point to? Well it’s the same culprits who are pushing all of the insanely damaging agendas, and last time I looked these people come in more than one ‘flavour’;
”OBR data confirms that low-skilled immigration is destroying the UK economy
Each low-skilled migrant will cost the taxpayer £465k by age 81
Only 5% of migrants (1 in 20) are net contributors to the economy as high-skilled workers. They contribute £1 to the economy whereas low-skilled immigrants cost the economy £1.60.
Mass immigration is not boosting economic growth, it’s crippling it.
By every measure – economic, cultural and social – mass immigration has been the greatest act of harm in our long island story. It’s worse even than the cost of fighting the Second World War.
A generation of Quisling politicians of all stripes have betrayed Britain and are complicit in our nation’s civilisational decline.
Those who aided and abetted in the catastrophic events of the past quarter-century must be held to account.
This means not only the politicians & civil servants who pushed this false prospectus, but also their Lord Haw-Haw cheerleaders in the media.
And it includes those in the CBI and big business who, without any concern for the wider societal impact, selfishly lobbied government for a never-ending supply of cheap labour.
Importing cheap labour suppressed wages and enabled them to avoid the costly – but vital – investment in innovation, technology and capital infrastructure that would have reduced the need for low skill migrants in the first place. (Eg. Job mechanization/automation, robotics etc.)
Never forgive. Never forget.”
https://x.com/RafHM/status/1836078827476516942
Excellent 20min lecture and overview of this topic from Rafe here ( 2022 );
”Over the past 25 years, since the election of New Labour in 1997, Britain has undergone a profound demographic shift that has fundamentally changed the character of towns and cities across the kingdom. The fabric of many of these communities has been altered to such an extent that they are often unrecognizable to the generations who once called them home.
From the old mill towns of the North to the heart of our capital city, this demographic change has created parallel societies of segregated populations whose daily lives pass with little or no interaction with wider society. And, increasingly, they are becoming hotbeds for extremism, sectarianism and cultural crimes such as honour killings.
What is the solution? Historian and New Culture Forum Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo outlines the dire situation facing us in Britain and whether Denmark offers some practical solution to stop or at least slow our worsening predicament.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6a8BXzDPbw&ab_channel=TheNewCultureForum
It’s worth mentioning that the pygmy Tory minister who sacked Scruton by text! was none other than Action Man Tom Tugenhadt. That scion of the Tugenhadt family; uncle an EU Commissioner, father the country’s top judge on privacy & the media. I don’t hold these things against him but I’m sure an upbringing amongst such people colours your thinking.
As an aside, if you’re interested in how you set about building 300,000 houses a year in a non-disastrous fashion go & read Scruton’s report ‘Build Back Beautiful’ (I think the title was his little joke). It makes the radical suggestion that the houses, estates, new-towns, should be pleasant places to live. I know, it’ll never catch on.
Tugenhadt has also been a guest at the Bilderberg Group.
English identity is what evolved organically over millennia punctuated by very few significant influxes of foreigners – and those foreigners were white European Christians. Until recently.
Yup, pre Windrush is a good place to start. Coming back from hols on Air France the hostess was offering Tea & Coffee, when I asked for Tea she was like, ‘why an I not surprised’. Tea drinking is a good example of Britishness, not unique to Englishness though.
It is difficult to take any Tory seriously after they participated in 14 years of destruction and enabling for everything we, the people, want to remain.
I would go further and call them a bunch of lying scumbags. It was also Blair that removed the death penalty from the Treason Act. One of the first things he did in 1997 apparently, I wonder why!
I’m with you on that one.
They are a disgusting bunch the whole lot of them.
They need leaving in the gutter where they belong.
We need a bit more Trumpian spirit, fight fight fight!!!
They think it’s a “gotcha” but it’s really not. You don’t have to be able to define something exactly in order to think it is of value and to defend it – it just needs to be mean something to someone/enough people.
He doesn’t need “defending” – we should be entirely unapologetic when talking about National or Ethnic Identity. If the Sky bloke had been interviewing a brown person of some kind or a Jew or a person of some non-Christian religion, do you think he would have asked the same question.
Or a Monk from Tibet.
Excellent article. And yes the “journo” was previously with BBC, ITV and Ch 5. So, well tutored in the ‘gotcha’ skill set so prevalent these days.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Jenrick and his Tory pals have been fooling us on immigration for 14 years. Far too little, far too late Jenrick. You Tories are finished.
“than a Catholic communicant … before she receives the Host”
Part of Englishness is sticking to traditional English Grammar and avoiding Americanisms (dove into the water; sped up; etc), and fads such as using female generic pronouns as above.
Sometimes they are entirely inappropriate:
’the drunk driver is a menace: she is young, she has no impulse control; she is reckless’
’the knife carrying person is despicable: she is irresponsible, hot-headed, proud and easily impressionable’.
English identity: that would be the Angelcynn – White, Angel, Saxon, Jute, Danish mix, English speaking, Judeo-Christian heritage, Common Law abiding, shared morals, values, manners, traditions, bones of our ancestors going back 1 500+ years resting in the soil of England.
True Englishness can be summed up in the film: The Lady Vanishes. The original!
Steyn in Jenrick:https://www.steynonline.com/14664/identity-and-evasion
Superb.
To (mis)quote Louis Armstrong, “if you gotta ask you’re never gonna know”.
Ironic that the same people who would question the existence of Englishness struggle with words that do have an essentialist definition, e.g. “woman”.
Many thanks for explaining this. I came across what Wittgenstein said about games years ago and thought “so what?” but I can see the point of it now.
Excellent article – I get the same jibe about Englishness from an Irish friend and former boss. Now all I have to do is remember the argument….
Nice to see the Conservative leadership hopefuls reforming their ideas, so to speak, although every move begs the obvious question.
The definition of Englishness