by Ramesh Thakur, Brownstone:
Last year the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted a deeply troubling position on abortions. In a long and thoughtful article on an issue that is as emotionally fraught as it is intellectually and morally challenging, Dr. David Bell explains how the organization’s abortion care guidance published in March 2022 calls for babies to “be killed up until the moment they emerge from the birth canal, without delay, whenever a pregnant woman requests it.” Thus Recommendation 2(LP) says that abortion should be available on request and 3(LP) advises against “laws and other regulations that prohibit abortion based on gestational age limits” (p. xxv).
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Whatever possessed the WHO to set itself up as the arbiter of the moral compass of all the peoples and countries of the world? Under no conceivable circumstance is this a decision to be arrived at by an international bureaucracy. Only the governments concerned have the right and the responsibility to make decisions on policy parameters between the competing demands and value preferences of pro-choice and pro-life advocates. This is not just a bureaucratic but also a moral overreach.
The WHO has also been captured by the woke activists, as can be seen in the following sentence from the executive summary:
In this guideline, we recognize that most of the available evidence on abortion can be assumed to be derived from research among study populations of cisgender women, and we also recognize that cisgender women, transgender men, nonbinary, gender-fluid and intersex individuals with a female reproductive system and capable of becoming pregnant may require abortion care (p. 4).
How can any organization that spouts such anti-empirical rubbish as “women, girls or other pregnant persons” be accepted as an authority on science, biology, medicine or public health? A search of the document reveals that the phrase “pregnant person” occurs 65 times, including Recommendation 2(LP) mentioned above. The WHO has become just another vehicle for global cultural imperialism of the US woke agenda.
On top of this, the WHO has determined that alcohol is dangerous for your health, regardless of how little or how rarely you imbibe. And if you believe you drink responsibly, you are just the alcohol industry’s useful idiot.
The WHO tells us that alcohol accounts for 5.1 percent of the world’s disease burden and “contributes to 3 million deaths each year globally.” On 4 January, a WHO news release insisted that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for health.” Over the last three years we have been conditioned to accept that safety through public health trumps all other values and considerations, including such quaint old-fashioned notions as liberty, free choice and individual responsibility for one’s health and lifestyle choices.
On 15 April, in the latest iteration of its role as the world’s nanny, the WHO published Reporting about Alcohol: A Guide for Journalists in which it effectively attacked the notion of “responsible drinking” as disinformation. This “vague notion,” the WHO says, is “a marketing tool and a tactic to influence public beliefs about the alcohol industry.” It neither tells us when to stop nor acknowledges the option of abstinence.
Furthermore, the phrase responsible drinking allegedly “ignores the inherent risks in consuming alcohol, mischaracterizing its harms as the result of a small minority of individual drinkers who cannot control their intake,” and stigmatizes those who cannot hold their drink. “It puts the entirety of the blame for alcohol problems on individual drinkers rather than more prominent environmental factors such as advertising, pricing or availability.”
Thus three key elements of the successful weaponization of Covid for ensuring compliance with voodoo science diktats from the WHO are being replicated to socially engineer human behaviour on drinking, behaviour that is as old as human civilization: scare-mongering, shaming, and controlling the media narrative around it.
The Challenge of Global Governance
Covid-19 illustrates how the source and scope of many critical problems are global and require multilateral solutions, but the policy authority and requisite resources for tackling them are vested in states. An efficient architecture of global health governance would have detected the emerging epidemiological threat early, sounded the alarm and coordinated the delivery of essential equipment and medicines to population clusters in most need.
The WHO is at the centre of the existing architecture. It works worldwide to promote universal health care, monitor public health risks, prepare for emerging epidemiological emergencies and coordinate responses. It sets international health standards and guidelines and provides technical assistance to countries in need. It is credited with eradicating smallpox and coordinating the response to SARS.
Yet, its Covid performance was underwhelming. Its credibility was badly damaged by tardiness in raising the alarm; by shabby treatment of Taiwan to avoid upsetting China despite the potential lessons to be learnt from Taiwan’s early measures to check Covid; by the initial investigation that whitewashed the origins of the virus; and by flip-flops on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
Dented credibility is not regained by appointing Sir Jeremy Farrar, a leading British advocate who also helped to coordinate efforts to shut down investigations into Covid’s origins in leaks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conspiracy theory, as the WHO chief scientist. To the contrary, it is evidence of the brazen contempt for the peoples of the world, the opening words of the United Nations Charter notwithstanding.
For problems without passports, in Kofi Annan’s evocative phrase, we need solutions without passports. Instead, international and domestic border closures, wholesale quarantine of healthy populations and mandatory vaccine requirements insinuated passport requirements into quotidian activities. Insisting on universal vaccination, rather than targeting those at most risk and ignoring healthy children and young people at negligible risk, meant that many who needed them urgently got them late and also that massive amounts of public money was wasted.
Health includes mental health and well-being and is highly dependent on a robust economy, yet the WHO-backed package of measures to fight Covid damaged health, children’s immunization programs in developing countries, mental health, food security, economies, poverty reduction, and educational and social well-being of peoples.
