Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?

[hawk]

I would suggest it is time for everyone to leave.

copied from:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is- ... e-the-who/

Christopher Snowdon
Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?
From magazine issue:
10 June 2023

Since declaring Covid-19 to be ‘over as a global health emergency’ early last month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has made it very clear that it has no intention of reforming. At its World Health Assembly two weeks ago, North Korea was among ten nations elected to sit on the WHO’s Executive Board, thereby giving Kim Jong-un’s totalitarian state the power to appoint WHO regional directors and potentially vote for the next director-general. The World Health Assembly did not censure North Korea for its countless human rights abuses, which include starving its own people. Instead it singled out Israel for criticism.

A few days later, as Russian bombs fell on Ukrainian families, the WHO’s director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, met Putin’s deputy health minister to discuss what Dr Tedros described in an ill-advised tweet as Russia’s ‘work to advance maternal and child health’. Dr Tedros also found time to meet the president of Fifa, perhaps the only international organisation that has faced more allegations of corruption and incompetence, to sign a four-year extension of its Memorandum of Understanding.

With Covid-19 fading as a health threat, the WHO is keen to get back to talking about its real priorities. In April, it published ‘Reporting about alcohol: a guide for journalists’, an alleged ‘fact sheet’ largely written by neo-temperance campaigners which falsely claims that ‘there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions’. There is, in fact, a mountain of such evidence built up over decades.

Last month, the WHO published a report claiming that artificial sweeteners do not help people lose weight and may cause cancer. Last week, Dr Tedros declared that switching from smoking to vaping should not be seen as harm reduction and that e-cigarettes are ‘a trap’.

The WHO appears to have strayed further from its mission to protect health under Dr Tedros. Its failures during the pandemic are well known. The WHO denied that there was human-to-human transmission of Sars-CoV-2 taking place long after there obviously was. It did not declare a pandemic until 11 March 2020, weeks after the official criteria for a pandemic had been met. It denied that the virus was airborne despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and it told the public that face masks should not be worn by healthy people before suddenly flip-flopping and supporting mandatory mask laws. Dr Tedros claimed that stigma was more dangerous than the virus, applauded China’s ‘commitment to transparency’ and launched a bizarre attack on Taiwan, which he accused, without citing evidence, of being racist towards him.

One of Dr Tedros’s first acts as director-general was to appoint Robert Mugabe as a WHO goodwill ambassador. It was an early sign that the former health and foreign affairs minister of Ethiopia’s Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist political party responsible for numerous human rights abuses, might not have the soundest political judgment. The appointment was rescinded after a worldwide public backlash, but the fact that it was ever made says a lot about this broken and morally bankrupt organisation. How many WHO officials, from the executive board to the press office, nodded through the idea of celebrating a genocidal tyrant? Didn’t anyone think it would be a bad look? Does the WHO have any checks and balances at all?

There is an argument that the WHO has to engage with some of the world’s worst regimes to keep them onside. Lines of communication must be kept open and information must be shared. It would do no good for the WHO to kick the likes of Russia and North Korea out of the club. This is not the Eurovision Song Contest, after all.

But there is a difference between engaging with nasty dictatorships and publicly applauding them. Refusing to allow Taiwan to attend the World Health Assembly is arguably a necessary piece of realpolitik to keep China in the big tent, but did Dr Tedros really have to say, in January 2020, that China was ‘setting a new standard for outbreak response’ and that the Chinese Communist party’s partial and belated sharing of information about the virus was ‘very impressive and beyond words’? Did Dr Tedros’s predecessor, Margaret Chan, really have to say that North Korea had a health service that ‘most other developing countries would envy’ and remark positively on the low rates of obesity in that wretched country?

When Dr Tedros became the first African to lead the WHO, there were hopes that it would get the organisation back on track fighting infectious diseases – Margaret Chan had often seemed more interested in starting fights with what she called ‘Big Food, Big Soda and Big Alcohol’ than dealing with Ebola and Zika. Alas, Covid-19 showed the WHO to be as flat-footed as ever and as the pandemic fades in the rearview mirror, the organisation has returned to its comfort zone of flapping about western lifestyle issues.

There are legitimate questions about whether artificial sweeteners contribute significantly to weight loss in practice, but what purpose is served by suddenly advising people to avoid them, especially when the standard of the evidence in the accompanying WHO report is described by its own authors as ‘low certainty’ and ‘very low certainty’? How credible is this advice when the WHO is still telling food and drink companies that replacing sugars with artificial sweeteners is one of the ‘most cost-effective and overarching initiatives that can help to prevent NCDs [non-communicable diseases]?’

As for vaping, the WHO has always been hostile and has become even more trenchant since the billionaire nanny statist Michael Bloomberg started funding it. Bloomberg, who is now a WHO goodwill ambassador, makes no secret of his desire to wipe e-cigarettes off the face of the Earth. On 2 June, Dr Tedros said in a press conference: ‘When the tobacco industry introduced electronic cigarettes and vaping, one narrative they tried to really sell is that this is part of harm reduction. It is not true. It actually is a trap. Kids are being recruited at early age, ten, 11, 12 to do vaping and e-cigarettes because they think that it is cool because it comes in different colours, different flavours and so on. Then they get hooked for life. And most actually move into regular cigarette smoking.’

This is simply untrue. The tobacco industry did not invent e-cigarettes. Vaping was well established by the time tobacco companies entered the market. All credible health agencies, including the Royal College of Physicians, agree that e-cigarettes are vastly safer than smoking and are a textbook example of harm reduction. There is no evidence that most children who take up vaping become smokers. On the contrary, underage smoking has virtually disappeared in the UK and the USA as vaping has become popular.

The WHO is currently working on a Pandemic Preparedness Treaty, and there has been paranoid talk about a world government enforcing lockdowns and travel bans. In truth, the treaty is a largely bureaucratic affair which does not mention such ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ at all. The WHO does not have the means to force such policies on member states even if it was minded to (and it is against travel bans in any case). The problem with the WHO is not that it is looking forward to the next pandemic but that it lacks the competence to tackle infectious diseases and is constantly meddling in issues that go far beyond its original remit.

The organisation achieved some great things in the 20th century but it cannot dine out for ever on eradicating smallpox. It cannot expect to be taken seriously while it cosies up to some of the world’s worst regimes.

Or perhaps it can. Member states talk about reform but that talk is never followed by action. Dr Tedros was comfortably re-elected last year. Last month’s World Health Assembly saw member states agree to increase their financial contributions by 20 per cent, no questions asked. This sent a message that the WHO can do what it wants – and so it does. At times it feels as if it is actively trolling the public to see what it can get away with, to see how far it can push member states before one of them finally says: ‘Enough.’