Brownstone Institute
The WHO: Our New Overlords
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
According to its website, the World Health Organization (WHO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, “works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable.” In recent times, however, the organization has become a vehicle for corruption, deceit, and Chinese propaganda.
The WHO is an incredibly powerful organization with 194 member states. When the WHO speaks, the world listens. When the WHO decides on a plan of action, the world changes.
As the piece demonstrates, the WHO has aspirations of becoming even more powerful than it already is. If successful, the consequences could prove to be severe.
Last year, Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, wrote a stinging piece that took direct aim at the WHO’s “bungled response to the coronavirus.” Miller, like so many others around the world, was particularly disillusioned about the “misplaced trust” placed in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As many readers no doubt recall, the CCP did its very best to conceal the COVID-19 outbreak that originated in Wuhan.
Because of the WHO’s numerous failures, Miller argued persuasively that the United States, whose “funding of UN activities exceeds that of every other country,” should refrain from financing the organization unless an “effective oversight and auditing entity” can be created to oversee operations.
In 2020, shortly after suspending financial support, the Trump administration began initiating a process to withdraw the United States from membership in the WHO. However, upon taking office in January 2021, President Joe Biden quickly reversed that decision and restored funding practices.
A few weeks after Miller’s well-argued piece, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) introduced a bill designed to prevent the WHO from unilaterally imposing public health restrictions on the United States and violating the country’s national sovereignty. The legislation came after the decision-making body of the WHO, the World Health Assembly, met to discuss a “pandemic treaty.” If introduced, such a treaty would give the WHO far greater control over public health decisions in the United States.
Scott said: “The WHO’s radical ‘pandemic treaty’ is a dangerous globalist overreach. The United States of America must never give more power to the WHO.” He added that the bill would “ensure that public health matters in the country remain in the hands of Americans,” and it needed to be passed immediately. It wasn’t. It should have been.
From Jan. 9–13, clandestine meetings took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Those in attendance discussed the possibility of amending the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHR). For the uninitiated, the regulations are considered an instrument of international law, a legally binding agreement of basically every country in the world (except Liechtenstein) that calls on members to detect, evaluate, report, and respond to public health emergencies in a coordinated manner.
Michael Nevradakis, a senior reporter for The Defender, warned that if the proposed IHR amendments are made, then WHO members would essentially be stripped of their sovereignty. As Nevradakis previously reported, the IHR framework already allows Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general, “to declare a public health emergency in any country, without the consent of that country’s government.” The proposed amendments would give even more power to the director-general.
Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois, told Nevradakis that the proposed changes could violate international law.
Boyle, a legitimate expert who played a pivotal role in drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, believes we are heading toward “a worldwide totalitarian medical and scientific police state,” which the WHO directly controls. That’s because the IHR regulations “are specifically designed to circumvent national, state and local government authorities when it comes to pandemics, the treatment for pandemics and also including in there, vaccines.”
It’s clear to Boyle that the WHO is preparing to adopt the regulations in May of 2023, just a few months from now.
The brilliant researcher James Roguski also shares Boyle’s concerns. He claims that the WHO is attempting a global power grab by morphing from an advisory organization into what can only be described as a global law-enforcement agency. If introduced, the IHR changes, he suggested, “would institute global digital health certificates, dramatically increase the billions of dollars available to the WHO and enable nations to implement the regulations WITHOUT respect for the dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms of people.”
Although COVID-19 is now a distant memory for many, another pandemic, we’re told, is just around the corner. When it comes, the WHO may very well be in a position to order you, dear reader, to do exactly what it wants, when it wants. If these amendments are made in May, resistance may prove to be utterly futile.
Reposted from Epoch Times
Brownstone Institute
First Amendment Blues
From the Brownstone Institute
By
You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU.
I’m envious. The US has something the UK doesn’t have, namely a First Amendment. Yes I know there are those who wish the US didn’t have it either, including, I understand, John Kerry and that woman who still thinks she beat Trump the first time around. Kerry kind of wishes that the First Amendment wasn’t quite so obstructive to his plans. But from where I stand, you should be thankful for it.
Not only does the UK not have a First Amendment, it doesn’t have a constitution either, and that makes for worrying times right now. Free speech has little currency with Gen Z and the way it looks, even less with the new UK Labour government. Even Elon Musk, who takes a surprising interest in our little country, has recently declared the UK a police state.
It’s not surprising. Take for instance the case of Alison Pearson, who had the police knocking on her door this Remembrance Sunday. They had come to warn her they were investigating a tweet she had posted a whole year ago which someone had complained about. They were investigating whether it constituted a Non-Crime Hate Incident or NCHI. Yes, you heard me right, a ‘non-crime’ hate incident and no, this is not something out of Orwell, it’s straight out of the College of Policing’s playbook.
If you haven’t heard of them, you can thank your First Amendment. In the UK you can get a police record for something you posted on X that someone else didn’t like and you haven’t even committed a crime. NCHIs are a way they have of getting around the law in the same way John Kerry would like to get around the First Amendment, except it’s real where I live.
Alison Pearson is a reporter for the Daily Telegraph, but that doesn’t mean she can write what she likes. When she asked the police what the tweet was which was objected to, she was told they couldn’t tell her that. When she asked who the complainant was, they said they couldn’t tell her that either. They added, that she shouldn’t call them a complainant, they were officially the victim. That’s what due process is like when you don’t have a First Amendment or a constitution. Victims of NCHI in the UK are decided without a trial or a defense. They asked, very politely, if Pearson would like to come voluntarily to the police station for a friendly interview. If she didn’t want to come voluntarily, they would put her on a wanted list and she would eventually be arrested. Nice choice.
It’s true that there has been a public ruckus over this particular case, but the police are unapologetic and have doubled down. Stung into action by unwanted publicity, they are now saying they have raised the matter from an NCHI to an actual crime investigation. Which means they think she can be arrested and put in prison for expressing her opinion on X. And of course they are right. In the UK that’s where we are right now. Pearson tried to point out the irony of two police officers turning up on her door to complain about her free speech on Remembrance Day of all days, when we recall the thousands who died to keep this a free country, but irony is lost on those who have no memory of what totalitarianism means.
The way things are looking I would say things can only get worse. The new Labour government has made it clear that it wants to beef up the reporting of NCHIs and make them an effective tool for clamping down on hurtful speech. You might think these are quite rare but not a bit of it; 13,200 of these were recorded in the last 12 months, and that’s around 36 a day, and they go on your record and sometimes mean you end up with no job. They also have new laws planned to control misinformation and disinformation, something not just confined to the UK. Similar laws are planned for Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the EU. Germany in particular is keen to remove all misinformation from the internet, I understand.
Whenever I see the word ‘misinformation’ these days I automatically translate it in my head to what it really means, which is ‘dissent.’ Western countries, former champions of free speech, the bedrock of liberty and individual choice, en masse it seems, now want to outlaw dissent. What is coordinating this attack on free expression, I don’t know, but it’s real and it’s upon us. We are slowly being intellectually suffocated into not expressing any opinion that others might find objectionable or that might contradict what the government said. If you had told me that would happen in my lifetime, I would have called you a liar.
I live in the UK, the home of the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta, and the mother of parliamentary democracy. I was proud that we produced men like John Milton, John Stuart Mill, and Thomas Paine, that we understood the importance of the Areopagitica, the Rights of Man, and incorporated On Liberty into our social thinking. But those days seem long gone when police knock on your door to arrest you for an X post.
So I’m glad someone somewhere has a First Amendment even if we don’t. It may be your last defense in that republic of yours, if you can keep it.
Brownstone Institute
The Most Devastating Report So Far
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
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