Brownstone Institute
The WHO, the UN, and the Reality of Human Greed
From the Brownstone Institute
The World Health Organization (WHO) is not plotting to take over the world. We need to remember what it is; an organization of fairly ordinary people, not especially experts in their field, who have landed jobs and benefits that most of us would envy. Not intrinsically nefarious, the organization is just being obedient to those who fund it and who define how those funds must be used. This is necessary if its staff are to keep their jobs.
The WHO is, however, promoting a new treaty being discussed by its governing body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), aimed at centralizing its control over health emergencies. The WHA is also amending the International Health Regulations (IHR), which have force under international law, to give the WHO power to demand lockdowns, mandate vaccines for you and your family, and prevent you from travelling.
‘Health emergencies,’ in this context, are any potential risk that the Director-General determines might cause a significant problem to health. This could be a viral variant somewhere, an outbreak of information that he/she disagrees with, or even changing weather. The current DG has already insisted that all of these are major and growing threats. He even declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern after 5 people in the world died of monkeypox.
The rest of the United Nations (UN), in its current desperation over impending climate Armageddon, is much the same as the WHO. As temperatures reach giddy heights that were useful for growing meat and barley in Medieval Greenland, most of its staff don’t really believe we are on the cusp of extinction. They are just ordinary people paid to say these things, and concerned about job security and promotion if they don’t.
People whose wealth has made them very powerful see great gain in having the WHO and the UN act in this way. These people have also invested heavily in the media and politics to ensure broad support. Staff of the WHO and the UN who fight this from within are hardly going to enhance their career prospects. There is also just enough of a grain of truth in the stories (viruses do kill people and CO2 is rising while the climate is changing) to self-justify the overall harm they know they are doing.
The advantages of organizational capture
In reality, large organizations work for those who fund them. Most of their staff just do what they are told and accept their paychecks. A few courageous ones tend to leave or get pushed, many who lack the courage of their convictions hide behind the organization hoping that others will step up first, and some are a bit clueless and cannot really figure out what is going on. An unfortunate few genuinely feel trapped into submission due to difficult personal circumstances.
When the ethos of funding the WHO and the wider UN was about helping the world’s populations to improve their lot, this is what the staff generally advocated for and worked to implement. Now that they are guided by the very wealthy and by multinational corporations that have investors to please, they advocate and work for the benefit of these new masters with the same enthusiasm. This is why such organizations are so useful to those who wish to expand personal power.
In discussing how a relative few can influence or run these powerful international organizations, it is easy to think it is all unbelievable or conspiracist, if you don’t pause and really apply your brain. How could so few take over the whole world? If someone has as much money as whole countries, but does not have a country to look after, they really do have quite a lot of scope. Applying some of this money strategically to specific institutions that then serve as tools to influence the rest is achievable. Their staff will be grateful for this apparent largesse.
Institutional capture of this type is achievable when we relax rules on taxation and conflict of interest. allowing certain individuals and corporations to gain vast financial leverage and to openly apply it. If we then allow them to form public-private partnerships, their aims can be further subsidized with our money. If we allow our politicians to treat politics as a lifetime career, they will soon realize that rather than pleasing the populace it is more effective to cozy up with these people who can fund their career.
They can do this behind closed doors at resorts like Davos, while the corporate media distracts us by fawning over a teenager on the main stage raging against the machine. The result is inevitable, because the politicians need money and positive media coverage, and the cartels of the wealthy need more amicable laws.
International public health is now a stunning example of such corporate capture. The same entities fund the training colleges, research groups where the students will seek jobs, modelling that will define their priorities, agencies where they will implement their learning, journals they will read, and the mass media that will assure them it is all for the best. The media will also publicly vilify those who step out of line. The climate issue is not terribly different if you dig a bit. Those who comply will have assured careers, and those who don’t will not. Such industries will then shift to policies, and study results, that benefit the sponsors.
Try to think of a rich person who genuinely lost interest in becoming wealthier. There are a few saints in history, but greed is a powerful force that is seldom assuaged by accumulation of the stuff that greed seeks. There is nothing new under the sun, not greed and not those who try to pretend that the fruit of greed is something good.
The opportunities of feudalism
To achieve success in accumulating more power and wealth, you would have to, by definition, take sovereignty and wealth from others. Most people don’t like having this taken away from them. Power in a true democracy is granted by the people, not taken, and only held on the consent of those who granted it. Few ordinary people want to give up their wealth to someone already wealthier than them – they may consider transferring it in taxes in order to gain mutual benefit, but not giving it to another to use as the receiver pleases. To succeed in accumulating power and wealth it is therefore often necessary to take it by force or by deceit. Deceit (lying) is usually the least risky alternative.
Lies and deceit don’t work on everyone, but they work on many. As the enemy of deceit is truth, and the enemy of tyranny is equality (i.e., individual sovereignty or bodily autonomy), people who insist on truth and individual rights must be suppressed by those who wish to accumulate power. The most effective way is to silence them, and to reassure the majority who have fallen for the deceit that these nonconformists are the enemy (remember “Pandemic of the unvaccinated”).
Denigration and scapegoating, using terms such as “anti-X,” “Y-denier,” or “so-called Z,” make the non-complying minority look negative and inferior. The majority can then safely ignore them, and even feel superior in doing so.
If the mass media can be brought on board, it becomes almost impossible for non-compliers to clear their name and get their message across. The largest funders of media are now pharmaceutical companies. They are also large funders of politicians. The largest owners of media are BlackRock and Vanguard (who are coincidentally also the largest shareholders of several pharmaceutical companies). So, imagine how profitable it would be if these investment houses, directly and through lackey organizations such as the World Economic Forum, WHO or the UN, thought of using such assets to provide maximum profit (as, indeed, in an amoral business environment, they are supposed to do).
If a relatively new virus came along in such a scenario, all that would be needed is to apply those media and political assets to sow fear and confine people, then offer them a pharmaceutical way out of their confinement. Such a scheme would virtually print money for their investors. This pharmaceutical escape could even be made to look like a saving grace, rather than a scheme born of, and run through, greed.
Facing reality
A short glance at reality indicates that we do seem to be going through such a scenario. We have got society into a total mess by dropping the basic rules that kept greed at bay, then let greed run rampant and called it “progress.” Fear and impoverishment are symptoms.
The WHO, the UN, and the mass media are tools. Soon other tools will impose Central Bank Digital Currencies and generously provide a Universal Basic Income (an allowance, as is given to a child) to relieve the impoverishment. This programmable currency will be spent on what the financiers decide, and withdrawn on their whim, such as on any sign of disloyalty. It is exactly what slavery is, except a whip, or even the current approach of media sponsorship, will no longer be required to keep people in line.
To fix this, it will be necessary to take the tools away from those who are misusing them, whether the tools are the WHO, UN or whatever. If your really useful hammer is going to be used by an intruder to break your legs, then get rid of the hammer. There are more important things in life than banging in nails.
Put more plainly, as democratic countries we should not be funding organizations that do the bidding of others to impoverish us and erode our democracy. That would be self-destruction. We need to decide whether individual sovereignty is a worthwhile cause. Is it really true that all are born equal and should live equal? Or should we embrace a hierarchical, caste-like, or feudal society? History suggests that those on top will probably be keen on the feudal approach. Therefore, those not on top, and those who hold to beliefs that transcend greed, had better start taking this problem seriously. Ceasing support for institutions that are being used to steal from us is an obvious starting point.
By regaining maturity regarding the reality of human nature, we can start dismantling the prison being built around us. Treat the sponsored media as if they are sponsored. Try to tell the truth as often and as rigorously as we can. When light is shed on a trap, others are less likely to fall into it. When enough decide that what is intrinsically ours must remain ours, those who want to take it will be unable to do so. Then we can address health, climate, and whatever else in a way that benefits humanity, rather than just benefiting a bunch of wealthy self-entitled miscreants.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years? To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.
The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…
The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.
My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion: Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.
The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.
My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.
If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).
Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.
Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal
Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.
After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”
For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.
This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me, a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”
To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.
My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.
I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.
For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.
For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.
One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?
The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.
Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.
More Scandals
Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.
In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.
I also recognize that the authorized “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.
Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.
These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.
Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.
This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times
As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.
At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).
In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.
In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.
When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.
To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.
Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal
Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.
The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.
The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.
Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).
Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.
When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.
This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify
Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.
This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.
It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.
The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.
What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.
As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.
This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.
The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.
As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.
It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.
Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.
That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”
If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.
To End on a Hopeful Note
What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.
Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.
Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.
For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”
Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.
Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”
From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.
It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.
One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.
Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.
Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”
This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.
“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”
But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.
Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.
The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.
Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.
While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.
We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.
Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.
My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.
Republished from Perspective Media
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