The WHO’s silent coup
Plus: The Rise of the Biosecurity Complex
Dear all,
I’ve got a new piece out in UnHerd about the plans underway to give the WHO sweeping powers of intervention in the public health affairs of nation-states. This is problematic for a number of reasons — not least the WHO’s disastrous handling of the pandemic, which I talk about in the article — but first and foremost because the organisation has largely fallen under the control of private capital and other vested interests, most notably Bill Gates, the second-largest funder of the WHO. By transferring even more power to the WHO, we would effectively be transferring it to Gates and his corporate partners. It would mark the definitive transformation of global health into an authoritarian, corporate-driven, techno-centric affair — and risk making the Covid response a blueprint for the future.
A few days ago I also published an article in Compact which I consider to be one of the most important articles I’ve written in a while. In it, I trace the decades-long rise of “health security” or “biosecurity” as a new authoritarian paradigm and ideology of social control — and of the massive biosecurity complex that it engendered, which by 2020 had burgeoned into a mammoth of terrifying power and proportions, encompassing the world’s largest pharma and biotech companies, the biometrics industry, social media giants, traditional media conglomerates, national security (military and intelligence) apparatuses, global and national public health organisations such as WHO, the World Bank’s health division, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and their equivalents in other countries, private philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, and trans-Atlantic planning groups-cum-think tanks such as the WEF as important intermediaries between the various actors.
Finally, I also wrote a short piece about the extraordinary revelations contained in the Lockdown Files, based on more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between the then-UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic. The conversations relating to the management of care homes (the site of around 30% of all UK Covid deaths) confirm what we’ve been saying for some time, and that is that a huge number of Covid deaths, particularly in the first wave, weren’t caused by the virus itself, and certainly weren’t caused by the decision not to lock down sooner. They were caused by the decision to abandon the kind of focused protection of at-risk groups championed by all pre-2020 pandemic plans, in favour of a completely untried and untested “lockdown” model. This didn’t just have a devastating impact on people’s livelihoods, physical and mental health, education, and civil and democratic rights. It also failed disastrously in achieving the one thing it was supposed to achieve, as the Lockdown Files make clear: reducing Covid deaths.
If you’re interested in a deep dive into all of these issues, check out our recently published book:
Best regards,
Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thomasfazi
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)