Colonial regimes are good employers if you are from the colonising side. They pay well and offer exciting travel to exotic locations. They support your family with benefits and subsidies. And they convince you (because you want to be convinced) that you are benefiting the many whilst, as Rudyard Kipling insisted, carrying their burden. Rather than being an enabler of greed and pillaging, you are really bringing civilisation, such as education or healthcare – sacrificing yourself for the greater good. A humanitarian, even if at the beck and call of rich and powerful people.
International public health and decolonisation
The World Health Organisation (WHO) arose in the aftermath of World War Two, as much of the world was throwing off the yoke of colonial masters. Colonialist approaches varied, from those who built infrastructure and were seen to provide something for those they ruled, to those whose only interest seems to have been loot. Some had conquered well-functioning states, others replaced regimes as brutal as themselves. However, like slavery, colonialism, or imposing one’s will on others for one’s own benefit, is always wrong. Both probably go back as long as humankind, have been ubiquitous across most of history and remain prevalent today. We have learned to veil them.
The 1950s to 1970s saw half the world move from serving other nations to become more-or-less politically self-governing. It was far from smooth, with European powers ‘freeing’ their colonies based on arbitrary colonial borders and so leaving behind intrinsically unstable states (the Balkans tell us this is not just an Asian or African problem). Another legacy is the ownership of companies that extract resources, with former masters and their allies sometimes going to considerable lengths to maintain this. They ensured that their colonies remained, economically at least, colonies. Companies exist to extract and accumulate wealth, and the rich world wanted their companies to continue gaining higher returns from lower costs after their colonies were lost. Poorer countries tend to have lower costs and less oversight, and with a sufficiently amoral approach they can be kept that way. Wealth can still flow upwards to the former colonial power, even when the colony is officially free.
The WHO in its early days was relevant to this process as it stood for the benefit all, its constitution requiring it be controlled equally by each Member State. Each emerging state had one vote in its governing World Health Assembly – equals of their former colonial rulers. This differs from the United Nations Organisation (UN) itself, where past colonialists on the Security Council retain a power of veto. Though a UN agency, it was decided WHO should better reflect a decolonising world.
For some decades, WHO generally succeeded. Many people like to highlight the caveats – ‘but this Director General once said this’ or ‘another senior officer said that’ – but the organisation was bigger than those few. WHO concentrated on major addressable disease burdens such as malaria, tuberculosis and, later, HIV/AIDS. It helped make others like yaws and leprosy become rare. It prioritised the drivers of infant and child mortality. It also led the smallpox elimination campaign – at least accelerating its elimination.
Recognising the main determinants of longer life – improved living conditions, nutrition and sanitation – WHO prioritised these and emphasised the importance of community structures and primary care to achieve them. The Alma Ata declaration of the late 1970s, a million miles removed from the COVID-19 response of 2020, recognised the importance of local structures to health outcomes, reflecting the reality that improving human capital builds longer lives more reliably than chemicals supported by financial capital. As WHO had no one pushing it to overinflate the risk of profitable diseases, few people actually heard much about it.
Large disease burdens drain economies and prevent communities and countries from getting on their feet, especially when their children and young adults are dying. Inability to address the underlying causes of ill health ensures poverty and aid dependence. Building individual resilience and national capacity should do the opposite, and that was once WHO’s role. Success in this context would be steadily reducing dependency, with reduced requirement for foreign finance and workers. This, up to perhaps about the year 2000, was a common understanding within the international public health workforce. There was supposed to be an endgame to most of this work, where countries support themselves.
International public health and recolonisation
Working with the WHO towards the endgame of healthcare self-reliance (or completing decolonisation) were relatively few organisations. UNICEF (concentrated on child health), a few foundations like the Wellcome Trust, and traditional schools of tropical health and hygiene. Small non-government organisations (NGOs) worked around these. All, even the Wellcome Trust founded by a Pharma magnate, shared an emphasis on capacity building and on high burden diseases. Manufactured commodities such as drugs were part of achieving outcomes, but not the primary focus. Western people would study at Mahidol University in Thailand rather than a public health school in America because public health was about communities rather than funders.
The change since then has been dramatic. The WHO and its major pre-2000 partners are now outnumbered in an increasingly lucrative industry. The Global Fund is the main multilateral grant agency for malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. UNITAID, a public private partnership (PPP), is dedicated to establishing markets for vaccines, drugs and diagnostics in low-income countries. Gavi, the vaccine alliance, is a PPP buying and distributing vaccines. CEPI, a PPP founded quite extraordinarily at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 2017 almost 100 years after the last major pandemic, is dedicated solely to vaccines for pandemics. The Gates Foundation, a private charity with strong Pharma alliances, grew to fund and have governing influence over all the above, while the ever-growing World Bank’s health arm houses, among other things, the Pandemic Fund. All these entities share a common interest in expanding markets for commodities or in financing their use. None has the main historical determinants of longer life – improved sanitation, nutrition and living space – as a primary focus. Their work is not devoid of benefit, but the overall emphasis is clear.
Whole new campuses have been built in Switzerland and the United States over the past 15 years to house the thousands administering this profitable approach to managing health in low-income countries. They were not built in Nairobi or Delhi, but Geneva and Seattle. A thriving industry of non-government organisations (NGOs) serves them, headquartered also in high-income countries. These are staffed by recruits who studied ‘global health’ in colleges sponsored by donors whom they now aim to spend the rest of their lives serving. If there is money to be made manufacturing and distributing injectable chemicals, then they will find public health reasons to do it. If their sponsors prioritise climate, then climate will be a threat to health. If pandemics, then we will be told of an existential threat from disease outbreaks. It is the message, rather than truth, that keeps you employed.
Sponsoring global health schools in rich countries builds the dependent workforce required to ensure compliance with a colonialist, top-down agenda that is actually the antithesis of good public health. A few million dollars to the University of Zambia will likely do far more to address the root causes of poverty and child mortality than tens of millions to the University of Washington, but the outcomes are less well controlled. Wealthy people have a right to put their money where they want, but the job of agencies such as the WHO is supposed to be to ensure this does not affect policy. They are supposed to ensure that populations, communities and individuals facing large disease burdens still control the agenda. In this they have abjectly failed.
A lot of money buys a lot of consensus. One Geneva salary may support over 20 health workers in central Africa, but the focus of that Geneva-based worker is their own child’s education, their healthcare and holidays. For this, they must keep their job. With a quarter of WHO’s budget arising from private sources that also specify how the money is spent, the funder’s wishes naturally become the staff’s priority.
These are simple realities. The WHO and other international health agencies do what they are paid to do. Hence, a large proportion of global health staff in Geneva now prioritise natural pandemic risk, which in the past century has barely impacted overall mortality, over the millions who die as a result of simple micronutrient deficiencies. Whilst flying business class, they support policies that restrict access to fossil fuels in Africa, further embedding the poverty and undernutrition that they know shortens lives. This requires no conspiracy, it is the expected outcome of greed and normal human self-interest.
Facing the betrayal
These recent changes in global health are not entirely novel. The industry is returning to where it began – in the latter half of the 19th Century with the sanitary conventions that sought to protect the European colonial powers from an influx of plagues arising from their newly-acquired assets. A rapid increase in travel was seen to promote recurrent rounds of typhus, cholera and smallpox. Yellow fever outbreaks hit cities in the United States. Agreements between powerful countries sought to control the movement of people and dictate their healthcare whilst continuing to appropriate wealth.
We have simply turned full circle. Manufactured narratives such as that on pandemic risk do not just protect the colonial investment but have become a lucrative instrument of the colonial endeavour. The Western-based institutions listed earlier – WHO, Gavi, CEPI, UNITAID – are all developing a global marketplace for mostly Western corporations. Their workforce has become the enablers and enslavers – pulling a veil of altruism over the face of corporate greed to save us from the next ‘public health emergency’. Funnelling wealth from low-income countries prevents the transformation in health that growing economies would bring, maintaining the inequality necessary for the colonial model to work. In parallel with the expansion in the global health industry, the OECD notes that the gap between high and low income countries has increased 1.1% annually since 2015.
If international health institutions were succeeding in their claimed objective, building capacity and improving health, they would be downsizing. In contrast, they are growing while basic interventions such as nutrition are losing funding. The COVID-19 response demonstrated their purpose. While countries across Africa increased debt and poverty, sponsors of the global health industry landed unprecedented gains in wealth.
The buy-out of the original WHO dream occurred with the full consent of the workforce. Like the East India companies of a former era, WHO and its growing partners offer exciting and lucrative careers. Dismantling this will be a painful process for the many thousands on this gravy train, and they will fight as workers would in any large extractive industry under threat.
When WHO is headquartered in Nairobi or Delhi, we will know public health is once again about populations rather than profit. When the big public private partnerships concentrate on individual resilience rather than quick fixes tied to patents, we can believe decolonisation is the intent. Until then, the global health industry should be treated no differently than any growing industry that uses public money for the benefit of investors. The arms industry is an obvious parallel; they can both extract lives as well as wealth, and they both exploit the old colonial hierarchies. Seeing public health institutions as the neo-colonialist instruments they have become, and understanding what drives those within them, is essential for progress. A future world that is healthier and more equitable is still possible, but the public health momentum is clearly pointed elsewhere.
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 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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Ivor Cummins’ voice may sound computer generated, but I can assure you it isn’t. I suggest the writer of this piece contacts him directly and instigates a discussion, to which I believe Ivor would be fully open to.
Sadly whoever Robert Kogan is he has just binned all credibility – not because what he says strictly speaking might be correct regarding the use of the word ‘owns’ but factually speaking the WHO is IMHO such a corrupt organisation it is ‘owned’ in the sense of the gangland phrase “don’t forget, we own you”.
The UK is not ‘owned’ by corrupt hidden external political, commercial and industrial interests. But the webs of corruption in Whitehall and Westminster means the UK is ‘owned’ in the gangland sense.
And it is interesting that whenever I have tried to get information from WHO about their accounts I have been blanked.
Robert Kogan it seems has not.
I wonder why?
What is the smallest number of politicians and officials one has to ‘own’ to have influence over what happens in a country?
Politicians are easy [not all of course] with what is relative small change for the wealthy to make political donations or offer other incentives.
How much does it cost to buy a senior civil servant or two – and of course I am not suggesting they are for sale but one or two are likely to be open to financial or other incentives.
So it is not a matter of buying UK plc’s or WHO plc’s balance sheet.
It is a matter of getting the right people for the right price/incentives to win the day – sadly not great for the rest of us.
And we are simply unlikely ever to find out if this is going on and if it is the extent of it.
But unfortunately we have a pretty good idea it must be happening to some extent.
I am sure the majority of civil servants are genuine honest people some of whom are so committed they want to ensure DEI is strictly observed to the national detriment.
How much does favourable press coverage from the average journalist cost?
How many are open to incentives?
Are the many freebies showered on journalists from wealthy corporations and the like enough?
A few canapes and glasses of wine and the annual or more frequent invitation to those kinds of events?
After all one would not want to be gratuitously erased from the corporate or other Christmas card list.
Of course, I am sure the vast majority of journalists are ethical and would never stoop to such incentives for favourable coverage.
But then again, how is it a lot of news about important stuff is not available from the legacy media and we have to rely on sources like the Daily Sceptic and GB News?
Robert Kogan is mistaken. All his other writing suggests his motives are pure, so do not take my comments above to mean anything else.
I have no reason or evidence to suggest Robert Kogan is anything other than mistaken IMHO.
But I am not happy as you might guess from my foregoing comments.
Slightly off topic but I’m sure the man photographed above can shoulder some responsibility. Part of the COVID enquiry that the BBC have been all over. We have been witness to pure evil.
https://ufile.io/iuhhlg59
See what the WHO admits themselves about funding and the influence it has in Lillian Franck’s 2018 documentary TrustWHO.
An interesting pre-Covid documentary which also includes a section on swine flu and the involvement of Neil Ferguson.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2021/01/11/bill-gates-backed-climate-solution-gains-traction-but-concerns-linger/
Geo-engineering.
Here is something Billy is funding. This utter Next Tuesday is playing God with the whole of the planet now.
In Billy’s eyes he is god.
I know.
Even if you discard Billy boy’s “philanthropy” who is running these so called government funded NGO’s and what agenda do they have?The article skirts passed Germanies involvement, it invested heavily in bionTech even purchasing manufacturing facilities on its behalf so they could become the world leader in vaccine technology. It is the classic he who pays the piper calls the tune.
And of course no money passes under the table from – ahem – interested parties.
No.
No no no.
Naivety of the Week Award, awarded weekly on a week by week basis goes to:
ROBERT KOGON!
But I agree – the “X algorithm”, under Mr Musk’s “leadership” just as under Jack Dorsey’s, is indeed guilty of some serious sh*t.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/plastic-bottle-cap/
Thought we had left the EU?
No we are still tethered just like bottle caps. When these appeared a few months ago I thought ‘aye, aye,’ more manipulation. Oh yes, my behaviour has been manipulated, I just rip the damned things off.
Hey, stop showing off, hux, some of us don’t have a spare 25 Newtons of requisite force to tear the caps asunder. Actually, come to think of it, you’re directly guilty of excess CO2 production – that force doesn’t come from nowhere, y’ know!
On a serious note, the first time my milk carton had this cap, I thought I had moved it out of the way. A few sploshes of spilt milk and a couple of curses later, I found that the blasted cap had spun itself around under the effect of gravity to the bottom and thus diverted the flow of milk onto my kitchen top. That IS a waste.
Yes, zero tolerance now – caps get ripped off, first thing. Including that annoying dangly bit which also gets in the way.
Gotta love saving the planet.
Thanks M A k.
The multinationals producing or procuring these bottles won’t bother with creating a special line of bottles just for the UK market.
Similar annoyance you might be unaware of: Old Holborn tobacco sold in the UK comes with paper sticker with a banknote-style pattern printed on it which is otherwise empty. This paper sticker must be removed or destroyed before a pack can be opened. It serves no function in the UK but for sale in Germany, a tax stamp must (Steuerzeichen) must be on these packs. Presumably, it’s cheaper for the manufacturer when there’s just one kind of packaging, hence, people in the UK get bothered with the emtpy stickers because authorities in Germany demand such stickers.
Off-T
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-chemical-analysis-natural-years-today.html
This is definitely one for Chris Morrison.
Ridiculous article.
In the donors list provided, Kill Gates + Gavi is the largest financier.
This article is as nescient as saying that the Corona scamdemic was uninfluenced by Pharma + Kill Gates.
If Pharma controls ‘health’ in most countries which it does, is it not rational to believe that if the US Criminal State gives x $ p.a. that they are doing what their Pharma masters want?
Jesus Christ guy.
I’m afraid the only thing the author has demonstrated is that he doesn’t understand how the world works.
Obviously, he who puts the money wants to call the shots. Only in the fantasy world of a foolish kind is it otherwise.
And lo and behold, the top donors of the WHO are all organisations or countries that are highly invested in vaccines. Germany has BioNTech and does its bidding as has been widely reported here. The UK and the US have some the biggest pharmas and otgs.like the Welcome Trust all gunning for more jabs.
And the list tops out with Gates and Gavi.
And what is the WHO trying to do? Pass a new treaty that is all about coordinating the fight against disease with vaccines. Jesus, what a shock.
I would be more polite about the author if he didn’t take the condescending tone he has to criticise those who can see what is plain to see and which the poor idiot cannot see.
Well said.
What a naïve article.
The WHO like the rest of the global bureaucracy is ‘owned’ and ‘funded’ by big business interests, rich men, NGOs who own and fund it by lobbying (another word for bribery), influence and complicity.
The bureaucrats are willing partners in crime as their primary aim is their survival by ever increasing the things they have to do to justify their existence and get more money and bigger establishments.
Gates doesn’t provide much to the BBC or The Guardian given their total revenues but he certainly gets what he wants from the relatively small amounts he gives them.
Who is Robert Kogon?
WHO is Robert Kogon!
Leaving aside the merits of the article, I have strong doubts about the UK government feeling it needs to worry about my health, let alone some global body that is even less accountable.
I don’t agree with the commenters who deride the author Robert Kogon as “naive”.
I think he has just given us some very useful information about Taxpayers being forced to fund their own destruction by the WHO monstrosity. So while we are all gnashing our teeth at Bill Gates, we ourselves are being forced by our own governments to fund the whole scam.
Taxpayers being forced to pay for their own destruction is not news, Heretic.
The question is why. Why governments feel the need to sell us out. And money passing under the table is as old as the hills. Kogon IS naive. Or he is begging the question. Which is not necessary on DS.
I don’t want to imply that DS is a club. I understand that DS is trying to attract a new audience of people who are perhaps new to the idea of government corruption, whatever its colour! Good luck with that, eh…
Von der Layen is the head of the European commission and the job of the European commission is to produce vote-ready EU draft legislation. She doesn’t lead anything and neither does the European commission. Further, that the EU is largely paid Germany (as is the UN, for that matter) doesn’t mean it’s dominated by Germany.
Here’s a translation of some part of the political manifesto of the AfD:
The Euro (the currency) is broken as designed. The currency union necessarily turned into a sovereign debt union. We demand that the Euro experiment is to be ended. Should the Bundestag (German parliament) not agree with this, then, a referendum about the Euro must be held in Germany.
They’re demanding this because the way the Euro works is that Germany is underwriting to sovereign debt of the whole EU but without any influence over the spending decisions of the other EU governments whose political priorities in this area are very much different from the German ones. Eg, the German constitution demands that government budgets must be balanced, ie, that spending doesn’t exceed income. This rule is – especially by the current green-left government – frequently “creatively” circumvented in practice but that’s nevertheless how things are supposed to work.
When German politicians pour money into international organisation, its usually a fair assumption that their American puppet masters have ordered them to do so.
Please see this new video about Globalists/ WHO/ UN plans to use illegal immigrants as troops (some have already been trained in Turkey) to enforce the next Fake Pandemic Lockdowns, and that masses of Bird Flu vaccines for humans have already been shipped to the UK, while in the US they are already saying Bird Flu has jumped species to humans. It hasn’t, of course, but that will be the scaremongering tactic, apparently.
Breaking: Illegal Migrants that are pouring into our respective countries are in fact UN soldiers. (youtube.com)
This would line up with the WHO treaty getting ratified, which is probably the plan
Exactly.
What a Dumb article ! If this idiot can’t see the writing on the wall he should stop writing !!
“sources. As can be seen in the below graph from Iwunna et al., the remaining 82% came either directly from the member states themselves (55%) or from other UN (DODGY ORGANISATION)agencies besides the WHO, other international organisations like the European Union (ANOTHER DODGY ORGANISATION), international financial institutions like the World Bank (WOULD YOU TRUST THEM?), public-private ‘partnerships’ like GAVI (LESS SAID THE BETTER) – which, as the above graph makes clear, are themselves overwhelmingly dependent precisely on public sources of funding – and NGOs (NO VESTED INTERESTS THERE OF COURSE), which likewise largely depend on public sponsors such as the EU (ANOTHER WORD FOR CORRUPTION) for their funding.”
I rest my case.
The sheer complexity and opacity of the funding seems designed to conceal the truth. I very much doubt this is coincidental. If you catch a glimpse of a rat and smell a rat then there is probably a rat hiding in plain sight!
A little more honesty, transparency and clarity from the WHO would not go amiss!
It’s pretty obvious that the WHO, IHR legislation,UN, GAVI are controlled by Globalists, directly or via Government infestations.