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.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.