The grisly streak of neo-Malthusianism that runs through the green movement reared its ugly head earlier this week when former United Nations contributing author and retired UCL Professor Bill McGuire tweeted that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic. The tweet was subsequently withdrawn by McGuire, “not because I regret it”, but people took it the wrong way. McGuire is the alarmists’ alarmist, suggesting for instance that human-caused climate change could lead to more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Daily Sceptic will not take his views the wrong way. They are an illuminating insight into environmental Malthusianism that does not get anything like the amount of publicity it deserves.
Every now and then Sir David Attenborough allows the genial TV presenter mask to slip to reveal a harder-edged Malthusian side. Speaking to BBC Breakfast in 2021, he suggested that the Earth would be better off without the human race, describing us as “intruders”. In 2009, Attenborough became the patron of the Optimum Population Trust and told the Guardian: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.” In 2013, he made the appalling remark that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Too little land, too many people, was his considered judgement.
Any consideration of the refusal of food aid these days brings to mind the 19th century Malthusian Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant during the Irish famines who saw the starvation as retribution on the local population for their moral failings and tendency to have numerous children. He is said to have seen the great loss of life as a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of reform and regeneration.
Anti-human sentiment is riven through much green thinking. In 2019, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Patricia MacCormack wrote a book suggesting humans were already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” because of capitalism, and “phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world”. Green fanatics can be a joyless crowd – it is not enough to declare a climate crisis, now they want a ‘nookie’ emergency. As the economist and philosopher Robert Boulding once remarked: “Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
But at least most of them – one must fervently pray – stop short of Clemson University Philosophy Professor Todd May, who has asked if human extinction would be a tragedy. He is of the considered opinion that it might be a good thing “for those of us who are currently here to end our lives in order to prevent further animal suffering”. But he did accept that the policy would cause “significant suffering” among those who had much to lose by dying.
In an interesting paper published in 2022, the science historian Dr. Emily Klancher Merchant notes that environmental Malthusianism – the idea that human population growth is the primary driver of environmental harms and population control is a prerequisite to environmental protection – is experiencing a “resurgence”. She notes the views of Philosophy Emeritus Professor Sarah Conly who contends that it is not only wrong to have more than one child in the current environmental climate, but humans do not even retain the right to do so. Biologist Dr. Colin Hickey says that the threats posed by climate change justify “population engineering”, which he defines as the “intentional manipulation of the size and structure of human populations”. Governments should act to enforce a one child policy.
It is not an exaggeration to state that at the core of the modern green movement is a visceral hatred of humanity. There are just too many people on the planet, why won’t half of them just go away? The unnecessary Covid lockdowns were the ultimate luxury treat for many middle class fanatics – tons of social control, quiet streets, anyone not ‘essential’ locked away, plenty of food and drink in Waitrose. The American journalist H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy”. Imposing collective lock-away misery on entire populations – let joy be unconfined.
Industrialisation over the last 200 years has brought enormous benefits to humankind and given many people a standard of living beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors. Life in the ‘natural’ state is nasty, brutish and short, a fate still awaiting almost every species on Earth, except, at the moment, homo sapiens. The green movement is a rejection of enlightenment and progress. It seeks to impoverish populations with Net Zero fantasies backed by deceitful claims of climate collapse, mass extinctions and non-existent climate refugees. Any move to stop humans procreating children is evil personified. Actual triumphs of environmentalism such as the massive recent greening of the planet and the protection of wild spaces as countries become richer are ignored. We have seen many such destructive cults in the past – a drive to control other people whatever the cost – a cost not borne, of course, by the saviour class itself. A war on essential hydrocarbons is really an undeclared war on humanity and human development.
Treble pandemics all round.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironmental Editor.
The journalist Ross Gelbspan, who led the fight against what he called “climate denialism”, has passed away. Mr. Gelbspan who wrote for the Boston Globe and other mainstream outlets died of COPD (likely from smoking). He championed the idea that global warming results in the spread of disease and rising sea level. In 1995 he wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post:
We’re all familiar with future-horror stories about global warming – that in some distant era, the glaciers will melt, the oceans will rise and Florida will disappear beneath the waters. But a much more imminent – and deadly – threat from climate change is already upon us and could be felt in North America as early as this summer. Scientists call it a worldwide redistribution of disease ‘vectors’ – the animals, insects, microorganisms and plants that transmit disease to humans. To the layman, it means a global spread of infections.
Let’s examine our planet’s rising sea level first. A recent NASA satellite study found that:
The average global sea level rose by 0.11″ (0.27cm) from 2021 to 2022, according to a NASA analysis of satellite data. Since satellites began observing sea surface height in 1993 with the U.S.-French TOPEX/Poseidon mission, the average global sea level has increased by 3.6″ (9.1cm), according to NASA’s Sea Level Change science team. The annual rate of rise – or how quickly sea level rise is happening – that researchers expect to see has also increased from 0.08″ (0.20cm) per year in 1993 to 0.17″ (0.44cm) per year in 2022. Based on the long-term satellite measurements, the projected rate of sea level rise will hit 0.26″ (0.66cm) per year by 2050.
That’s right, less than four inches over a 30-year interval, which is not enough to get anyone’s shoes and socks wet. Context matters!
Another NASA satellite study covering 25 years found that the rate of sea level increase was speeding up: “Global sea level rise is accelerating incrementally over time rather than increasing at a steady rate, as previously thought, according to a new study based on 25 years of NASA and European satellite data. If the rate of ocean rise continues to change at this pace, sea level will rise 26 inches (65 centimeters) by 2100.” Two feet instead of the 30+ feet by 2100 that climate change advocates have been predicting.
Finally, a third NASA satellite study uncovered the fact that roughly 50% of the sea level increase along the U.S. East Coast was due to subsidence and not increasing water levels. Ergo, the other two NASA satellite studies may have overestimated the real increase in sea level by as much as 100%. Perhaps, only a one foot increase in sea level by 2100.
Interestingly, James Hansen in a 2023 published paper repeated his prediction that a dramatic sea level rise remains in our planet’s future. But he made a similar forecast in 2007, stating that the Earth would see serious sea level increase within 10 years. Six years after his deadline we still have a quiescent water level in our planet’s oceans. Since 1988 Dr. Hansen has been only wrong. Perhaps in the distant future he may turn out to be correct, but so far he has been solely incorrect.
Turning to the idea of spreading infections, diseases, pandemics and plagues, which Mr. Gelbspan predicted would spread to North America as soon as the summer of 1995, this has not happened even after over 25 years have passed.
According to the World Atlas there were six deadly epidemics during the 20th century: HIV/AIDS that killed almost 40 million people worldwide and is still killing 2.5 million per year, the 1918 Spanish Flu that resulted in 50 to 100 million deaths, the 1950s Asian Flu which killed 70,000 Americans, the 1968 flu with one million demises worldwide, the 6th cholera outbreak at the turn of the 19th century to which 800,000 succumbed, and the 1974 smallpox outbreak in India with 15,000 deaths. There have been no recurrences during the 21st century except the 2020 Covid pandemic that had zero connection with climate change.
According to the CDC there have only been a total of 496 cases of plague (that is spread by fleas) in the U.S. (almost all were in the South West) over the past 20 years. As of 2019, Our World in Data reported that only 3.2% of worldwide deaths were attributable to malaria and other infectious diseases. And almost all of these illnesses occurred in the tropics.
The bottom line is that Gelbspan has so far been only wrong about everything.
In four days’ time, on Wednesday September 20th, our representatives meeting at the United Nations will sign off on a ‘Declaration’ titled: ‘Political Declaration of the United Nations General Assembly High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response.’
This was announced as a “silent procedure”, meaning that States not responding will be deemed supporters of the text. The document expresses a new policy pathway for managing populations when the World Health Organisation (WHO), the health arm of the UN, declares a future viral variant to be a “public health emergency of international concern”. The WHO noted in 2019 that pandemics are rare and insignificant in terms of overall mortality over the last century. Since then, it decided that the 2019 old-normal population was simply oblivious to impending annihilation. The WHO and the entire UN system now consider pandemics an existential and imminent threat. This matters, because:
They are asking for far more money than is spent on any other international health program (your money);
This will deliver great wealth to some people who now work closely with WHO and the UN;
The powers being sought from your Government will reimpose the very responses that have just caused the largest growth in poverty and disease in our lifetimes; and
Logically, pandemics will only become more frequent if someone intends to make them so (so we should wonder what is going on).
Staff who drafted this Declaration did so because it is their job. They were paid to write a text that is clearly contradictory, sometimes fallacious, and often quite meaningless. They are part of a rapidly growing industry, and the Declaration is intended to justify this growth and the centralisation of power that goes with it. The document will almost certainly be agreed by our Governments because, frankly, this is where the momentum and money are.
Whilst the Declaration’s 13 pages are all over the place in terms of reality and farce, they are not atypical of recent UN output. People are trained to use trigger words, slogans and propaganda themes (e.g., “equity”, “empowerment of all women and girls”, “access to education”, “technology transfer hubs”) that no one could oppose without risking being labelled a denier, far-Right or colonialist.
The Declaration should be read in the context of what these institutions and their staff have just done. It is difficult to summarise such a compendium of right-speak intended to veil reality, but it is hoped this short summary will prompt some thought. Wickedness is not a mistake but an intended deception, so we need to distinguish these clearly.
Fomenting darkness behind a veil of light
Put together, the following two extracts summarise the internal contradiction of the Declaration’s agenda and its staggering shamelessness and lack of empathy:
In this regard, we:
PP3: Recognise also the need to tackle health inequities and inequalities, within and among countries…
PP5: Recognise that the illness, death, socio-economic disruption and devastation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic…
‘Recognition’ of devastation is important. SARS-CoV-2 was associated with mortality predominantly within wealthy countries, where median age of Covid-associated death was between 75 and 85 years. Nearly all of these people had significant co-morbidities such as obesity and diabetes, meaning their life-expectancy was already restricted. Most people contributing significantly to economic activity were at very low risk, a profile know in early 2020.
These three years of socio-economic devastation must, therefore, be overwhelmingly due to the response. The virus did not starve people, as the Declaration’s writers would like us to believe. Deteriorating disease control was predicted by WHO and others in early 2020, increasing malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malnutrition. Economic disruption in low-income countries specifically results in more infant and child deaths.
In Western countries, adult mortality has risen as expected when screening for cancer and heart disease are reduced and poverty and stress increase. Knowing this, WHO advised in late 2019 to ”not under any circumstances” impose lockdown-like measures for pandemic influenza. In early 2020, under the influence of its sponsors, it advocated them for COVID-19. The Declaration, however, carries no note of contrition or repentance.
Undeterred by incongruity, the Declaration goes on to describe COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges” in UN history (PP6), noting that somehow this outbreak resulted in “exacerbation of poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty”. In fact, it acknowledges that this caused:
(a) negative impact on equity, human and economic development across all spheres of society, as well as on global humanitarian needs, gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, the enjoyment of human rights, livelihoods, food security and nutrition, education, its disruption to economies, supply chains, trade, societies and the environment, within and among countries, which is reversing hard-won development gains and hampering progress (PP6)
To restate the obvious, this does not happen due to a virus targeting sick elderly people. It occurs when children and productive adults are barred from school, work, healthcare and participation in markets for goods and services. Economic, social and health catastrophe inevitably results, disproportionately harming poorer people and low-income countries, conveniently far indeed from the halls of Geneva and New York.
No, we were not all in this together.
Not all were negatively impacted by this catastrophe. People and corporations who sponsor much of the WHO’s health emergency work, and that of its sister organisations such as CEPI, Gavi and Unitaid, did very well from the policies they advocated so strongly. Software and Pharma companies made unprecedently high profits while this mass impoverishment played out. The international agencies have also gained; construction and recruitment are strong in Geneva. Philanthro-capitalism is good for some.
The main aim of the Declaration is to back the proposed WHO International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments and treaty (PP26), key to ensuring that viral outbreaks that have such small impact can remain highly profitable. An additional $10 billion dollars per year in new financing is requested to support this (PP29). There is a reason why most countries have laws against scams. The UN and its agencies, fortunately for its staff, are outside of any national jurisdiction.
Based on their sponsors’ assessments, the staff of these agencies are doing their job well. For the rest of humanity, their work is an unmitigated disaster. In 2019 they said never lock down, then spent 2020 defending top-down lockdowns and mandates. For three years, they theatrically pretended that decades of knowledge on immunity, disease burden and the association of poverty with mortality did not exist. Now they write this UN Declaration to fund their industry further through taxpayers they so recently impoverished. Once tasked to serve the world’s vast populations, particularly the poor and vulnerable, the UN vision has been consumed by public private partnerships, the allure of Davos and a fascination with high-net-worth individuals.
When words are used to obscure actions
While the Declaration underlines the importance of educating children during pandemics (PP23), these same organisations backed school closures for hundreds of millions of children at minimal risk from COVID-19. Among them, several million more girls are now being farmed off to nightly rape as child brides, others in child labour. Women and girls were disproportionately removed from education and from employment. They weren’t asked if they supported these policies!
The girls are being raped because the people paid to implement these policies did so. They know the contradiction, and the harm. But this is a job like many others. The only unusual aspects, from a business standpoint, are the sheer amorality and lack of empathy that must be engaged to excel in it.
To justify wrecking African children’s lives, the UN claims out that the continent has “over 100 major public health emergencies annually” (OP4). Africa has a rising burden of endemic diseases that dwarf mortality from such outbreaks – over half a million children die every year from malaria (increased through the COVID-19 lockdowns) and similar burdens from tuberculosis and HIV. By contrast, total COVID-19 deaths recorded in Africa over the past three years are just 256,000. The 2015 West African Ebola outbreak, the largest such recent emergency pre-Covid, killed 11,300 people. MERS and SARS1 killed less than 1,000 each globally. However, induced poverty does cause famine, raises child mortality and wrecks health systems – is this the health emergency that the UN is referring to? Or is it simply making things up?
Through the IHR amendments, these agencies will coordinate the locking down, border closures, mandated medical examinations and vaccination of you and your family. Their Pharma sponsors reasonably expect to make several hundred billion more dollars from these actions, so we can be confident that emergencies will be declared. By claiming 100 such events annually in Africa alone, they are signalling how these new powers will be used. We are to believe the world is such that only the abandonment of our rights and sovereignty, for the enrichment of others, can save us.
The UN and WHO do recognise that some will question this illogic. In PP35, they characterise such scepticism as “health-related misinformation, disinformation, hate speech and stigmatisation”.
The WHO recently publicly characterised people who discuss adverse effects of Covid vaccines and question WHO policies as “far-Right”, “anti-science aggressors” and “a killing force”.
This is unhinged. It is the denigration and hate speech that fascist regimes use. The reader must decide whether such an organisation should control his or her freedom of expression and decide what constitutes truth.
It is not helpful here to give details of all 13 pages of right-speak, contradiction and fallacy. You will find similar rhetoric in other UN and WHO documents, particularly on pandemic preparedness. Straight-talk is contrary to business requirements. However, the first paragraph in the Declaration’s ‘Call to Action’ sets the tone:
We therefore commit to scale up our efforts to strengthen pandemic prevention, preparedness and response and further implement the following actions and express our strong resolve to:
OP1. Strengthen regional and international cooperation, multilateralism, global solidarity, coordination and governance at the highest political levels and across all relevant sectors, with the determination to overcome inequities and ensure the sustainable, affordable, fair, equitable, effective, efficient and timely access to medical countermeasures including vaccines, diagnostics, therapeutics and other health products to ensure high-level attention through a multisectoral approach to prevent, prepare for and respond to pandemics and other health emergencies, particularly in developing countries;
There are 48 more. You paid taxes so that someone could write that!
Those millions of girls suffering at night, the hundreds of millions of children who had their futures stolen, the mothers of those malaria-killed children, and all suffering under the increasing burden of poverty and inequality unleashed by this farce are watching. The Declaration, like the IHR amendments and pandemic treaty it supports, await the signatures of the Governments that purport to represent us.
Dr. David Bell is a clinical and public health physician with a PhD in population health and background in internal medicine, modelling and epidemiology of infectious disease. Previously, he was Programme Head for Malaria and Acute Febrile Disease at FIND in Geneva, and coordinating malaria diagnostics strategy with the World Health Organisation. He is a member of the Executive Committee of PANDA.
The next pandemic could be even more deadly than Covid, a Government scientific adviser has warned as he said the U.K. needs to be better prepared for a future health crisis. The Mail has more.
Professor Mark Woolhouse said the coronavirus outbreak, which killed at least 227,000 in the U.K., was potentially nowhere near as bad as it could have been.
The epidemiologist told the Covid Inquiry the U.K. made a mistake in preparing only for an influenza pandemic rather than hedging bets across a multitude of different outbreaks, including coronavirus.
Professor Woolhouse, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Infections group on Modelling (SPI-M) which advised Government during the pandemic, said he did not want to cast himself as a “doom-monger”, but warned the next outbreak could be far worse.
He told the inquiry in London: “I hope this doesn’t sound too shocking, but on the scale of potential pandemics, Covid was not at the top and it was possibly quite far from the top.
“It may be that next time — and there will be a next time, I don’t know when, it may be quite some time in the future — we will be dealing with a virus that is much more deadly, and is also much more transmissible, in which case actually the things we did to control Covid wouldn’t work anyway.
“I am not sitting here as a doom-monger saying this is going to happen soon, but I am confident enough to tell Government that this is something you should be concerned about, you should be prepared for.
“The next pandemic could be far more difficult to handle than Covid was, and we all saw the damage that that pandemic caused.”
The inquiry, which is in its fourth week, has repeatedly heard from scientists and politicians that the U.K. failed to prepare for a pandemic other than the strict parameters of a flu-like outbreak.
Professor Woolhouse said this strategy was like betting on just one horse at the Grand National.
They just can’t help themselves with their fearmongering and endless ‘pandemic preparedness’, can they. And Mark Woolhouse had been one of the better ones, telling the Government last year that “most of the people who died in the first wave got infected during lockdown” and “lockdowns were not a proportionate or sustainable intervention and the forthcoming inquiry needs to take a critical view of their role”.
Well, this was your chance, Mark. So why are you instead telling the inquiry to make preparations to ‘control’ deadlier and more contagious diseases?
The truth is there has not been a global outbreak of disease that killed more than a fraction of a percent of the world’s population for over a century. Thanks to modern living conditions and medicine, ‘pandemics’ just aren’t something humanity has to worry about anymore. But that’s not the impression you get from listening to any of these scientists.
In the year from week ending June 5th 2022 to week ending June 4th 2023 the U.K. recorded 1,059 excess death per million people. The odd thing about this is that excess deaths in the U.K. in 2023 are higher than the excess deaths in the same period in 2020-21 in 13 of the 27 EU nations!
If the people of Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands and Sweden were so worried about the likelihood of dying that they acquiesced in locking themselves up, voluntarily trashed their economies and stopped their kids going to school back in 2020-21 (well, Sweden didn’t, but the rest did), why don’t we feel the need to do the same now? We have more excess deaths now than they had then.
If YouGov did a poll tomorrow asking whether or not we should, right now, go back into lockdown, how many thumbs up would it receive? Very few, I should hope. But if U.K. citizens don’t think it’s a good idea now, why did the Germans or the Finns or the Greeks think it was a good idea in 2020 and 2021? Could it be that they were manipulated? That they weren’t given the whole picture? That they were ‘had’?
Let’s try and put some perspective on this number. We can think of 1,059 excess deaths per 1,000,000 of population in several ways. As a straight percentage let’s round it down to 0.1%. This means that we expect 0.1% of the population to die in addition to the number of people we might ordinarily expect to die in the year. Or, if you prefer, an additional one person in a 1,000 will die in the year.
In the U.K. roughly one person in 100 dies every year, i.e., 1% of the population. But if we’re experiencing excess deaths at a level of 0.1% then we can expect that about 1.1% of the population will die this year. Let’s take the example of a large town or small city with 100,000 inhabitants. In a normal year we’d expect 1,000 deaths. With this year’s higher level of excess deaths, the funeral directors would expect to see 1,100 deaths. That’s all very straightforward.
In case you’d forgotten, let’s remind ourselves that the period from April 5th 2020 to April 4th 2021 included the two big spikes in fatality in Spring 2020 and winter 2020-21. It’s also the period that ended before the vaccine rollout was in any way complete. While about 50% of the U.K. population had received one dose of vaccine by then, in the EU the figure was only about 20%. This period was very much the year when we would have expected to see peak ‘all-cause’ pandemic excess deaths in the U.K. and across Europe with very little amelioration from vaccines or prior infection.
Figure 1
Figure 1 shows all-cause excess deaths across the EU for the period April 4th 2020 to April 5th 2021. I’ve overlaid the Our World in Data chart with a thick red line representing U.K. all-cause excess deaths from June 5th 2022 to June 4th 2023. You can see that U.K. deaths in 2022-23 would have ranked ‘mid-table’ among EU countries in 2020-21.
What to make of this? It prompts a few questions that surely the Hallett Inquiry should ask. Such as: “If there are more excess deaths per head of population in the U.K. now than in half of the EU in 2020-21, were the Europeans mad to lockdown then, or are we mad not to lockdown now?” Or: “Given that, with the honourable exception of Sweden, all these countries broadly followed the same set of policies, do the Bulgarians, with about 3,500 per million excess deaths and Denmark with below average excess deaths, both consider that lockdown was a valuable tool?” If lockdown was so effective, why were deaths in Bulgaria so high? If the pandemic was so deadly, why were they so low in Denmark?
But the fun doesn’t end there. Figure 2 picks out the U.K. and 13 EU countries with excess all-cause deaths in the 12 months to April 2023 (the latest date for which figure were available for all countries) greater than 750 per million. Back in 2020-21 this level of excess deaths would have put you mid-table in the EU excess death league. Clearly, in 2020-21 it was considered essential to lock down populations with these modest levels of excess death (or indeed, lower).
Figure 2
In figure 2 all-cause excess deaths for the 12 months to April 4th 2021 are indicated by the blue bar and for the 12 months to March 26th 2023 by the orange bar. In eight of the countries – Germany, Finland, Austria, Latvia, Greece, Estonia, Netherlands and Ireland – excess deaths in 2022-23 have been higher than in 2020-21. In Germany for example, excess deaths in 2022-23 have been four times higher than in 2020/21. In Finland in 2020-21 fewer people than normal died, while now they have excess deaths that would have placed them in the top half of the EU death league back in 2020-21. Ireland and Greece have almost twice the level of excess deaths in 2022-23 that they had in 2020-21.
Just for fun, put yourself for a moment in the shoes of the German, Austrian or Irish equivalent of Lady Hallett. How would you, with a straight face, justify to your fellow countrymen spending several hundred million euros looking into the awful events of the ‘once in a century’ 2020-21 pandemic, when death supposedly stalked the land, resulting in excess deaths far lower than they are now?
The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) proposed Pandemic Treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) will hand the international health body unprecedented powers to declare pandemics, lockdowns and vaccination mandates, with the force of international law, leading experts have told MPs.
Speaking to U.K. lawmakers at a meeting of the Pandemic Response and Recovery All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), Dr. David Bell, a former WHO scientific and medical officer, and Professor Garrett Wallace Brown, Chair in Global Health Policy at the University of Leeds and Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborative Centre on Health Systems and Health Security, said that the changes would fundamentally alter the relationship between WHO and member states and put vital health programmes at risk.
Dr. Bell explained that the two agreements, as currently drafted, will hand the WHO the authority to order measures including significant financial contributions by individual states, censorship of scientific debate, lockdowns, travel restrictions, forced medical examinations and mandatory vaccinations during a public health emergency of its own declaring.
He said:
The WHO was established in 1946 with the best of intentions, to help coordinate responses to major health issues and advise governments accordingly. Over the decades we have seen a significant change in direction as funding streams have shifted to private ‘specified funding’, particularly from private donors. This has led to the WHO becoming a far more centralised and externally-directed body in which private and corporate funders shape and direct programmes. What we have also seen shifting is the definition of a health emergency, making it extremely broad. It is a worrying background against which the IHR amendments and the Treaty are being negotiated.
These pandemic instruments are founded on a fallacy regarding the frequency and impact of pandemics and would, if ratified, fundamentally change the relationship between the WHO and national governments and their citizens. Of particular concern are the amendments to the IHR which constitute a dangerous increase in power and authority bestowed on just one person. The Director-General would be able to proclaim health emergencies, whether real or potential, on any health-related matter that they, influenced by their private and corporate funders, say is a threat. The WHO would be able to issue legally-binding directions to member states and their citizens. In light of the catastrophic harms the WHO’s policies have caused during this pandemic, probably greater than the virus itself, the potential economic and health-related harms of such power cannot be overstated. There is a vast pandemic industry waiting for these buttons to be pushed and I am in no doubt that policymakers should reject WHO’s pandemic proposals.
Professor Brown and his research team has been advising the WHO and others on the $31.1 billion a year plan for pandemic preparedness and whether it is defensible or even feasible. Vital public health programmes are suffering globally as a result of the misguided shift to focus on post-Covid pandemic preparedness, he warned.
The post-Covid policy environment has triggered a remarkable grab by various institutions to capture the pandemic preparedness and response agenda and its corresponding financial capacities. This raises concerns about the legitimacy of the policy processes in terms of the representativeness of the emerging pandemic preparedness agenda. One particular concern involves the $31.1bn per year price tag, particularly the more than $24bn a year required from low-and middle income countries. The concern is whether this number is appropriate or even feasible. Nations need to be able to address their individual public health needs, to encourage better population health and resilience and the sort of sums they will be required to contribute to pandemic preparedness could threaten to divert resources from where they are most needed. We already saw this happen during the pandemic and there is evidence to suggest this has continued.
For example, tracking Overseas Development Aid for health from 2019 to the present shows that vital and established preventive public health programmes have suffered globally as a result of policy shifts to Covid and post-Covid pandemic preparedness and response. Evidence shows that malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, AIDS, reproductive health and non-communicable diseases have been impacted by resource shifting. Overseas Development Aid saw a 34% decrease in funding for basic health and a 10% decrease for basic nutrition in developing countries. The fear is that emerging pandemic preparedness instruments will be a continuation of this trend, which will have significant population health effects.
Listening to the speakers, APPG Co-Chair, Conservative MP and former Government minister Esther McVey said:
In April, I spoke at the Westminster Hall debate on this topic [and] much more parliamentary scrutiny and debate is needed. As the COVID-19 Inquiry begins to hear evidence, how we prepare for future pandemics must be carefully considered. We have heard concerns about the expansion of the WHO’s powers, the encroachment on national sovereignty and the rights of the individual and the sheer cost of the plans. These are vast amounts of public money to prepare for pandemics when we have a proportional, evidence-based pandemic plan, formulated to prevent the avoidable suffering and loss we have now experienced. The Government abandoned those plans in early 2020, despite knowing the likely outcomes.
The Treaty and IHR amendments could cement a disastrous approach to future pandemics. It seems unwise to give an unelected and largely privately-funded supranational body power over sovereignty and individual rights with seemingly no oversight. My constituents are concerned, not least because the WHO has a poor track record when it comes to pandemics. I question whether we want to hand such authority to the WHO, whose focus in recent decades has moved away from its laudable founding principles, to blunt instruments such as lockdowns and a one-size fits all approach to public health with the terrible consequences we are now seeing.
APPG Co-Chair, Labour MP Graham Stringer MP, added:
I am opposed to these plans as they could represent a huge expansion of the WHO’s powers, to the detriment of public health. The authority it could gain would surely pressure countries into complying with diktats of its choosing. We saw the unaccountable and extreme influence of China on the WHO when it refused to investigate the Wuhan laboratory and the origin of SARS-CoV-2. It’s also worrying to see the increase in commercial interests within the WHO.
We experienced the WHO’s unscientific volte face on mask wearing, despite there being no strong evidence that they had suddenly become effective. It was an entirely political decision, much like many of the decisions taken by the U.K. Government, often in the absence of any real parliamentary scrutiny. We appear to have learnt nothing from that experience, in terms of both the eye-watering cost and the vast collateral damage, which the Treaty and amendments seem set to enshrine in the WHO’s principles. If these plans come to be, we would be handing over powers to an organisation with less clinical and scientific expertise than our own.
It may not be clear how the WHO will enforce these powers but we know the potential is there as we lived through it, and not just with Covid but also swine flu previously. The ease with which unelected bureaucrats can dictate damaging public health policy and erode democracy, civil liberties and individual rights is something we never want to happen again. This is why these plans demand robust debate, and an open review in Parliament and in public. As Sweden did during the pandemic, and is an example to us all, we must make our own decisions about how we manage public health threats in this country.
During the week ending May 26th 2023 there were 1,397 recorded deaths from heart failure. That’s 424 or, if you prefer it as a percentage, 44% higher than the ‘expected’ number of 973 deaths for the same week in 2020. That seems like a very significant change to me.
But why am I comparing the level of heart failure deaths in 2023 to the expected level of heart failure deaths in 2020? It’s because since 2020 the ‘expected’ level of deaths has been inflated by high levels of deaths since then. For a more detailed explanation of what’s happened please see a previous piece that was published in the Daily Scepticon May 18th.
The Office for Health Improvements and Disparities reports that heart failure deaths were only 16% higher than expected during week ending May 26th 2023. I think this is misleading.
Table 1 illustrates how heart failure deaths in 2021 and 2022 being incorporated into the level of ‘expected’ deaths in 2023 has skewed the data. In 2020 we expected 973 heart failure deaths during week 21, in 2023 we appear to expect 1,209, an increase of 24%.
Put it another way; no excess deaths at all would be reported unless heart failure deaths in 2023 were more than 24% greater than in the same week in 2020. Nothing to see here, move along please!
Table 1 shows the issue:
These figures come from the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities and can be seen here. The data are available via a very neat selectable graphical tool but for those of you who like to get into the weeds there’s also a data download available.
If those were the expected deaths from heart failure, what was the actual level? Table 2 shows us the answer. In the final week of May 2023, 1,397 deaths were registered as being from heart failure in England. This was 16% higher than the 2023 ‘expected’ level, but 44% higher than the 2020 ‘expected’ level.
Of course, data from a single week aren’t necessarily representative of a general trend, and I confess there’s a bit of cherry-picking here. Nonetheless, heart failure deaths in the previous week were even higher at 1,468, the week before they were at 1,363. Maybe 1,397 isn’t an outlier?
We can look at the trend by simply comparing the data from the 10 weeks numbered 12-21 for both 2020 and 2023 as reported by the Office for Health Improvements and Disparities.
Figure 3 shows the level of registered deaths (orange line) in 2023 compared to the ‘expected’ level of heart failure deaths (blue line) in 2020. The grey bars show the variance between the two lines as a weekly percentage in line with the right-hand axis. You can see the 44% increase in week 21, the trend line has hovered between 25% and 30% over the past 10 weeks.
You may recall that the Chief Medical Officer published a paper ascribing the increase in heart failure to a reduction in the prescriptions for statins, an explanation soon debunked by Drs. Heneghan and Jefferson (see here). To my knowledge no further explanation has been floated by the authorities; rather, they’ve ignored the problem. After all, leave it long enough and the inflation of ‘expected’ heart failure deaths will make the excess magically disappear. Soon enough they may even be reporting that heart failure deaths are reducing year on year, even though they may still be much higher than the pre-pandemic level.
Finally, in Figure 4 I’ve shown the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities reported excess deaths for both heart failure and cancer. Bear in mind that the baseline in the case of heart failure has been inflated so the chart, arguably, understates heart failure excess deaths. The same is not so true for the cancer deaths. Expected deaths from cancer in 2023 are only 3% higher than they were for the same period in 2020. Over the 10 weeks from week 12-21 cancer deaths in 2023 have been only 1.7% higher than the expected level for the same period in 2020. This suggests the sharp rise in heart failure deaths is not due to a general increase in deaths from all causes such as might be caused by an ageing population.
Make of it what you will, but it seems to me that deaths from heart failure should be a real cause of concern. It’s not so long ago that the likes of Hancock and Gove were telling us that ‘one death is one death too many’. The lack of concern with the current level of excess deaths, many of them heart related – which the Government has now said it has no plans to investigate – highlights that this view was always sanctimonious tosh.
Lockdown measures could be imposed on the U.K. by the World Health Organisation (WHO) during a future pandemic under sweeping new powers, Government ministers fear. The Telegraphhas the story.
Member states would be obliged to follow the agency’s instructions when responding to pandemics, including by introducing vaccine passports, border closures and quarantine measures, under a draft update to its regulations.
A new ‘pandemic treaty’ under discussion would also force Britain to spend 5% of its health budget on preparing for another virus outbreak.
Ministers are understood to be alarmed by plans to increase the WHO’s powers enabling its governing body to require countries to hand over the recipe of vaccines, regardless of intellectual property rights, and to counter misinformation.
Conservative MPs have written to ministers to warn of an “ambition evident… for the WHO to transition from an advisory organisation to a controlling international authority”.
In their letter, seen by the Telegraph, they urge the Foreign Office to block powers that “appear to intrude materially into the U.K.’s ability to make its own rules and control its own budgets”.
Responding to the concerns on Thursday, Andrew Mitchell, a Foreign Office minister, told the Telegraph that he would block any law that prevents the U.K. from setting its own health policy.
“The UK is supportive of the pandemic treaty currently being negotiated by national governments, which could speed up the sharing of data on new pandemic threats so we are able to respond quickly in the event of future pandemics,” he said.
“We’re clear that we would never agree to anything that crosses our points of principle on sovereignty or prevents the U.K. from taking decisive action against future pandemics.”
The rule changes have been proposed as part of plans to update the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHRs) in light of the coronavirus pandemic and establish a new Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.
The treaty was first proposed by world leaders including Boris Johnson in 2021 during the pandemic and was originally designed to improve alert systems, data-sharing and the production of vaccines to “foster an all of government and all of society approach”.
But among 300 proposed amendments to the IHRs are changes to make the WHO’s advice “binding” and introduce a new requirement for countries to recognise it as the global authority on public health measures.
The plan would require member countries to “recognise WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response… and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response”.
If passed, the change would mean the WHO could enforce border closures, quarantine measures and vaccine passports on all member countries, including the U.K.
A draft of the treaty itself would commit member states to spending 5% of their health budgets, plus a proportion of GDP, to pandemic preparedness.
Six Conservative MPs led by Esther McVey have written to Andrew Mitchell to call for a Commons vote on the draft treaty and regulations before they are signed.
The letter has also been signed by Sir John Redwood, David Davis, Philip Davies, Sir Christopher Chope and Danny Kruger.
UsForThem’s Molly Kingsley has warned in particular about the WHO’s move to become the global authority on ‘misinformation’. She told the Telegraph: “We should all be concerned about the WHO being ordained as an arbiter of pandemic truth, especially given its poor record during the pandemic, such as its claim that Covid was definitively zoonotic in origin and its April 2020 denial of the role of natural immunity in protecting against infection.”
Good to see MPs and the mainstream media finally catching up on the dangers of these changes. Have they only just got round to reading them?
However, they appear to have missed the memo from the WHO making clear that the idea that the new pandemic treaty and regulation changes will “cede power to WHO” is, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “misinformation” and “fake news”.
His reasoning goes that it is countries who will decide the wording and scope of any global agreement on how to tackle the next pandemic, “and countries alone”. Hence there is no ceding of sovereignty.
Erm, but that doesn’t change what the treaty says, which is that any signatories to the treaty are required to follow the instructions of the WHO during a public health emergency. Oh, and also that it’s the WHO that unilaterally decides when something is an emergency, or even just a potential one.
No obvious dangers in that arrangement.
Stop Press: If you can’t get behind the Telegraph’s paywall, the Mail has the same story.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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