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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Well pursued! It’s only persistent digging that turns up the worms.
Who cares what the BBC says, since when would any level of credibility be given to the BBC… Its like complaining to the flat earthers…
Ok prove to me the earth isn’t flat and is a sphere, without using anyone else’s photographs
And when is being rude been allowed here
When the moon landings are obviously fake
I rarely watch or believe anything the BBC says these days but sadly many older people in particular still turn to the Beeb for a trustworthy version of the truth.
The problem is, a significant proportion of the population look to the BBC’s their ‘trusted’ source, so it really is about fine the Govt clamped down on then and made it very clear that their legal Charter for impartiality is there deliberately and for a purpose. Will they though? I doubt it.
Since when has lying become acceptable?
Since the left went full woke, It’s now their main political lever!
“When it becomes serious, you have to lie.” ― Jean-Claude Juncker
Junker.. ex president of the European Commission.. says it all really..
“We all have to lie sometimes for the greater cause.” (Scientist to Prof Fenton referring to misinformation on climate change programme).
Well if its for the ‘greater cause’ then.. yes.. of course..
The left’s philosophy is ‘the end justifies the means’. If that means they have to lie, cheat and kill to rescue the public from capitalism and liberty, they’re willing to do it.
How far is far right I ask myself.. just up the road from extreme right. It seems you can’t safeguard your own well being today without being labelled.
I’m hovering between being an NVE (non violent extremist) and a DT (domestic terrorist).. and there was me thinking I was just a retired working class bloke who cared about his family, fellow man, and country.. I’m obviously mistaken.. silly me!
Exactly. If I’m “far right”, which the BBC probably thinks I am, then what’s wrong with being “far right”?
But by using these terms all the BBC do is reveal that climate is a political issue not a scientific one. ——Or as someone once pointed out “When you mix politics and science, what you get is —–Politics”.
Science only gets you so far. Ultimately everything is political. That’s why we have politics. In this case the science being used isn’t really science.
The BBC also reveal that they are happy to basically call everyone who doesn’t agree with them a Nazi, without having the balls to actually use that word.
They.. the BBC.. will never call anyone a Bolshevik either.. that would be a call too close to home..
I give you my version of what you just said. ——-Government cannot wait for the science so they use “consensus science” as the excuse for forging ahead with policies. Which by the way are mostly the same Liberal Progressives policies as they would want whether the climate was changing or not. —–In other words, it is and never was about the climate in the first place. ——-And as for the BBC, they are simply the climate crisis megaphone.
Indeed. I guess my point was that even with honest, accurate science there are political decisions to be made because there will always be tradeoffs – science is unlikely to come up with perfect solutions to complex problems. It’s a political decision to choose which competing interests are the most important. Even with covid I actually think it was right that politicians should have made the big decisions – they just made the wrong ones. In Sweden, politicians listened to experts and things turned out reasonably well, in the UK our politicians at least pretended to listen to experts and it was a shitshow.
My actual status would be ‘peak common sense’ which in today’s terms translates to ‘far right.’
Oh well.
We should perhaps take comfort from our enemy’s desperate attempts to smear us – the more desperate they get the more it’s clear they feel threatened
The ‘far right’ are left wing extremists. They have nothing to do with conservatives and libertarians.
Well said George. I’m probably considered “far right” but all that’s happened is we’ve probably stayed politically where we’ve always been and “the establishment” has moved further and further to the left. Just my theory, like my conspiratorial ones, which seem to be coming remarkably true.
BBC reporters said they had seen someone at the demonstration who had made social media postings. How did they know his/hee name and user name and why did they trawl the internet looking for it.
this suggests to me a very active political agenda and deployment of significant resources by the BBC. We’re they promoted by Khan’s staff on this too.
Much indignation expressed on this thread about BBC bias but I wonder how many commentators are still paying their TV propaganda tax? This was a nasty habit I gave up long ago.
I’ve got mixed feelings about this. In general, making the BBC look like the far left political organisation that they are is a good thing. On the other hand, are we being too defensive and/or not questioning the right things.
What do the BBC mean by “far right”? What is wrong with being “far right”? Why do we accept it as a “smear” term?
Believing there are people trying to bring about a New World Order might sound far-fetched (I’m undecided) but why is that belief “far right”?
“Far right” is basically a way to call people Nazis or Fascists (by Fascists I mean Mussolini’s lot) without saying say.
“Believing there are people trying to bring about a New World Order might sound far-fetched (I’m undecided) but why is that belief “far right”?”
Well you do surprise me tof. You will be on my side within twelve months and that’s a certainty.
I don’t doubt there is evil afoot, just unsure of the extent to which it is coordinated
‘Twas ever thus – the new elements that seem most dangerous to me are it’s global nature and the ease with which technology can be used to control people
Never forget that Hitler had at least one islamic batallion (common enemy the jews) – that to me makes Khan Far-Right
Meloni, Orban, LePen, AfD, BBB, VOX, any leader or party, ostensibly with concerns about immigration & supports traditional ideas of ‘family’ is labelled ‘far right’ by the BBC. It’s exactly the attitude demonstrated in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial (1960), when the QC asked “would you let your wife or servant read this?” It’s the Left now demonstrating a kind of patronising contempt for the rest of us. “Let them eat cake”, could well be a slogan by either main party at the next election.
Perhaps we should all jump on the Prime Miniters house. That doesn’t seem to bother the Progressive left (like the BBC) very much as they fall for the “global boiling” narrative coming from the one world government people at the UN.—– Yep you can stop traffic and sporting events and glue yourself to the street but to the BBC you are simply “highlighting” a serious “emergency”. But if you don’t want your car taken away and your gas central heating ripped out you are FAR RIGHT.
Or be White of course..
Far right is only far when viewed from the extreme left.
Many conspiracy theorists are now being proved to be so far right.
Excellent work Richard. The BBC reporter clearly holds a worldview whereby anything challenging the confected consensus/elite narrative on climate change is seriously triggering. That’s why she made up stuff about Nazi signs. The fact that authoritarian Mayor Khan uses his ethnicity as does the SNP leader to “other” his opponents is typical of the contemporary left. Unfortunately media are now far from disinterested in issues, as the increasingly histrionic Justin Rowlatt shows, they are activists for a cause. That means they have to find ways to discredit their opponents. The Far Right slur is the standard reply. However it’s wearing thin, and the genuine coalition of concerned Londoners cannot be silenced.
The weasel-wording in the BBC statement is excellent — We sent reporters supposed to do nothing but take images supporting our preexisting far-rightness theory but they couldn’t find any. As we were convinced they must have been there, though, we simply reported our theory as fact without having evidence for it — after all, compared to the number of people watching our programmes, London is village and most of our audience won’t have been there.
The BBC and the rest of the MSM do this all the time, so you can either complain and pursue every single instance, or embrace your position on the political spectrum as they define it. If resisting progressive nonsense makes me “far right”, so be it.
The first step is to ask them what they mean by “far right”.
The BBC need to be shut down permanently they are a toxic rumor in this country, protecting paedophiles, promoting racism and advocating transgenderism
Like all petty dictators Khan doesn’t like it when people see through his lies (children’s health vs more tax for me to waste) and complain. Typical, leftie nut case. Thank heavens I’m not living up there anymore
“I hope that doesn’t make me a “conspiracy theorist”
I love being called a conspiracy theorist. I take it as kudos nowadays and it usually means they’ve lost the argument.
Does anyone take the Beeb seriously these days..? Oh dear sadly yes many still do.
This one excruciatingly long boiling frog!
“In short, Khan appears to be exercising at the very least some form of influence over the BBC’s coverage of anti-Ulez protests.”
Khan is a mendacious snake. A Bare-faced liar and a self-serving villain.
I’ve posted this before, but if you haven’t seen it, just watch London Mayor Sadiq Khan, unable to answer simple questions about his claims, quickly resorting to insults. He is a disgrace and should be thrown out of public office and locked up.
This clip should be seen by everyone of voting age in and around Greater London.
https://www.facebook.com/TogetherDeclaration/videos/9400281276650412/?extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-AN_GK0T-GK1C&mibextid=1YhcI9R