Brownstone Institute
What’s Really Happening with Mpox
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/tvrd-ls-who-big-business-image-2024-08-07.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The Mpox Emergency
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
Brownstone Institute
The Foreboding UN Convention on Cybercrime
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From the Brownstone Institute
By
The UN committee approved the text of the Convention on Combating Cybercrime. Human rights organizations and information technology experts have called it a threat to democracy and the free world.
“One of the world’s most dangerous surveillance treaties was approved with a standing ovation,” wrote Austrian digital rights group Epicenter Works.
The UN General Assembly is now due to vote on the adoption of the Convention in September.
“It can be assumed that the treaty will be accepted without difficulty at the UN General Assembly in September, and will thus be officially considered a UN convention. After that, it will be available for signature and subsequently it can be ratified,” said political advisor Tanja Fachathalerová. “It can be assumed that it will not be a big problem to achieve the necessary forty ratifications, which are necessary for the treaty to enter into force.”
Legitimization of Repression against Journalists and Opponents
The proposed international treaty aims to combat cybercrime and improve international cooperation between law enforcement agencies. However, more than a hundred human and civil rights organizations around the world have warned of a serious threat to human rights and criticized the fact that the text of the treaty lacks adequate safeguards. According to them, the planned agreement would oblige UN member states to introduce comprehensive measures for the supervision of a wide range of crimes.
“The contract is really a surveillance agreement with too few provisions on data protection and human rights. In practice, it legitimizes the more repressive measures against political opponents or journalists that we now see in authoritarian states,” writes the netzpolitik.org server.
China and Russia Stood at the Beginning of the Convention
It all started with a UN resolution initiated in 2019 by Russia, China, and other countries (such as Iran, Egypt, Sudan, and Uzbekistan) with 88 votes in favor, 58 against, and 34 abstentions.
European states have proposed changes, but according to experts, the resulting compromise does not even meet the conditions necessary to preserve privacy and protect human rights.
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“Unfortunately, a data access treaty has been drawn up that will allow governments around the world to exchange citizens’ personal information in perpetual secrecy in the event of any crime the two governments agree is ‘serious.’ This would include eavesdropping on location and real-time communications around the world, and force IT workers to divulge passwords or other access keys that would compromise the security of global systems that billions of people rely on every day. And it’s not just private sector systems – government systems are also at risk,” said Nick Ashton-Hart, Digital Economy Policy Director at APCO, who is also leading the Cybersecurity Tech Accord delegation to the Convention negotiations.
The Threat of Criminal Prosecution of Journalists and White Hackers
The Ashton-Hart treaty also puts journalists and whistleblowers at risk of prosecution. The International Press Institute was so concerned about this risk that it placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post. Independent security experts around the world also warned in February that they could face criminal prosecution for their work protecting IT systems from cybercriminals under the draft Convention.
Governments Could Prosecute Children for Sexting
“Incredibly, the text expressly allows governments to prosecute children for “sexting” in the same article (14) that is supposed to protect them from sexual predators. The article also puts people working in charities who help bring predators to justice at risk of prosecution because they need access to material created by predators as part of their work. Civil society advocates have repeatedly pointed out this obvious deficiency, but to no avail,” Ashton-Hart said.
Concerns about Freedom of Expression
According to experts, companies that operate internationally will also be exposed to increased legal and reputational risk after the arrest of employees. The private data of individuals and vulnerable communities can be accessed by law enforcement agencies around the world, even in cases where the perpetrators’ actions are not criminal in their place of residence or in cases that raise significant concerns about freedom of expression.
Cooperation between authorities and states can be kept secret without transparency about how governments use the treaty, or without provisions that allow companies to challenge law enforcement requests, even if they are illegal.
Criticizing Leaders as a Crime?
“Facilitating collusion in any ‘serious’ crime opens the door to ‘crimes’ such as criticizing leaders or persecuting minorities,” writes Ashton-Hart in his analysis.
On August 13, the International Chamber of Commerce, the world’s largest and most representative representative of the private sector, openly called on the UN not to adopt the convention at the General Assembly in September.
“If governments fail again to protect the international human rights legal framework they so often vociferously support, then new, dangerous norms created in international law will haunt us for decades to come,” Ashton-Hart said.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
Trust in Doctors and Hospitals Plummets
![](https://www.todayville.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/tvrd-brownstone-doctors-trust-medicine-vaccines-health-care-image-2024-09-10.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The condescension, overt political motivations, and outright derision directed at those who were rationally skeptical of a brand-new vaccine, masks, and the extreme and harmful lockdown policies by medical practitioners and hospital systems have finally led to an inevitable consequence: the public simply does not trust them anymore.
A new paper in JAMA analyzes survey respondents in the US over the period of time right after the Covid pandemic started in April 2020 and through early 2024. It reveals a significant decline in trust in physicians and hospitals, dropping from 71.5% in April 2020, to 40.1% in January 2024. Lower trust levels were strongly associated with reduced likelihood of receiving Covid-19 vaccinations and boosters. Total shocker, right?
![](https://i0.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-19-748x800.png?resize=740%2C791&ssl=1)
One incredibly interesting part of this study was the revealing of the open-text responses that survey respondents gave for their lack of trust. From the supplement, here are the top 4 themes why patients have lost trust.
1. Financial Motives Over Patient Care: This theme includes perceptions of healthcare as primarily profit-driven, where financial incentives outweigh patient welfare. Respondents believe that decisions are made based on profitability rather than the best interests of patients.
2. Poor Quality of Care and Negligence: Responses that mention experiences of neglect, inadequate care, misdiagnosis, or dismissive attitudes from healthcare providers fall under this category. This also includes perceptions of healthcare professionals not listening or taking patient concerns seriously.
3. Influence of External Entities and Agendas: Here, the focus is on the belief that decisions in healthcare are unduly influenced by pharmaceutical companies, government entities, or other external powers. This includes suspicions of dishonesty or withholding information for nonmedical reasons.
4. Discrimination and Bias: Responses indicating experiences or beliefs that healthcare providers exhibit bias, discrimination, or lack of cultural competency. This can include racial discrimination, gender bias, or insensitivity to patient backgrounds.
Another interesting analysis in the supplement was the inclusion of political affiliation. The tendency for Republicans and Independents to have lower trust overall than Democrats should not surprise anyone, as the polarization of vaccines, masks, and lockdowns made it clear that the left was in favor of doing anything at all in the name of combating Covid, no matter the cost.
![](https://i0.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-20.png?resize=633%2C421&ssl=1)
As we witnessed firsthand in 2020 and 2021, and even today, the condescension, overt political motivations, and outright derision directed at those who were rationally skeptical of a brand-new vaccine, masks, and the extreme and harmful lockdown policies by medical practitioners and hospital systems have finally led to an inevitable consequence: the public simply does not trust them anymore. And not by a small margin—there has been a massive swing from majority trust to majority distrust. For anyone who was paying attention, this is not shocking.
For my part, I hope that the practitioners we truly need to rely on when we require medical care see this as a wake-up call and understand just how much damage they have done to their long-term doctor-patient relationships. Now, instead of starting from a place of trust, they are starting from a deficit. This is not just bad for their careers; it’s bad for the patients.
Republished from the author’s Substack
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