COVID WHO
"Strong leadership is essential in the face of health crises" -Tedros Ghebreyesus
Per the WHO, “On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China.”1
Two weeks later, the organization published “Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR”2 to its website, a non-peer-reviewed paper whose authorship had massive undisclosed conflicts of interest. It was later fiercely critiqued by a slew of preeminent scientists.3
For better or worse, the paper would serve as the primary basis for the notoriously irregular PCR testing of the subsequent fiasco.
Over the coming weeks, Tedros would repeatedly praise China for “the transparency they have demonstrated”4 and their “commitment” thereto, which Tedros said to be “very impressive, and beyond words” in his January 30th Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) declaration.5
In its piece on the matter, the Associated Press wrote, “But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed.”6
Roughly a year later, Tedros would send Ecohealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak, longtime Wuhan lab collaborator and perhaps the world’s most interest-conflicted figure on the topic7 to be the de facto face of a notoriously China-curated investigation.
At a certain point during his subsequent 60 Minutes interview, in which Daszak described China’s responses to his team’s questions, host Lesley Stahl burst out, “But you’re just taking their word for it!”
Daszak replied, “Well, what else can we do? There’s a limit to what you can do. We went right up to that limit.”8
Most notably, in his initial speech declaring a PHEIC, Tedros would single-handedly set the tone for the pandemic response by praising China for its “extraordinary measures”.9 At that time, footage was already circulating of Chinese citizens being welded into their apartments,10 a practice that would continue in the coming months,11 aided by Tedros’s staunch reaffirmations.12
The ensuing promotion of the shutdown of entire economies manned and frequented almost entirely by people under the age of 70 for an illness classification that was statistically a threat only to those above it has been said likely to be “the biggest policy mistake in modern times.”13
Tedros would grandstand as an advocate for poor countries, largely ignoring the global ramifications he was, in theory, supposed to care about, such as that no less than 150 million additional children were plunged into poverty as a result of pandemic measures,14 dying at a rate of roughly a quarter million biannually from the consequent hunger alone, according to UN reporting.15 As for broader effects, another report from Unicef found that same number, a quarter million, died as a result of the lockdowns in just half a dozen South Asian countries in 2020 alone.16
The fight against tuberculosis, the global overall deadliest infectious disease17, was set back a dozen years.18 Similar setbacks had occurred in the domains of malaria (which witnessed an additional 13 million infections19), nutrition-related diseases20, child marriages21 (which doubled22), and child labor worldwide.23
In terms of the cost in life years, a measure of the amount of time relative to life expectancy that is lost, none of these policies were rational for the first world either, as a multitude of studies have demonstrated.24 25 26 27
…cost-benefit analysis of the response to COVID-19 finds that lockdowns are far more harmful to public health (at least 5–10 times so in terms of wellbeing years) than COVID-19 can be.28
Even in the short term, the rate of death from all causes for younger adults rose by a bigger percentage than the rate of death from all causes for the elderly, first proven by NBER29, and verified by the New York Times.30 The Times’s acknowledgement was not trivial. Just one year prior, the paper had evangelized pandemic measures to the point of publishing an article titled, “Actually, Wearing a Mask Can Help Your Child Learn” by psychologist Judith Danovitch.31
A few months after the harrowing NBER study, however, national testing data was released.32 The Times put out a somber article titled, “The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading.”33
The issues for young children were not merely academic. Per the CDC, roughly 30 percent of students said one of the adults at home lost their job.34
A record 420,000 children a month in England were treated for mental health problems,35 and in the United States, the suicide attempt rate among teenage girls jumped 51%.36
MIT found an increase in youth suicides carried out in 202037 and the CDC found a substantial increase in 2021 for young adults, especially in 15 to 24 year old males.38
Unfounded rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, state-by-state analyses repeatedly showed that lockdown policies didn’t work even for their intended short-term purpose of reducing COVID deaths.39 40 41 42
Even if they had, they would have still produced “more harm to children in exchange for less harm to adults” as the Time’s David Leonhardt ceded43, which in virtually all circumstances is wrong on its face. Moreover, this publication is not aware of a single survey in which the typical COVID victims, statistically elderly and moribund, were polled demanding for young people to make sacrifices on their behalf.44
Thousands of medical and public health scientists45, including some of the world’s most distinguished immunologists,46 were censored in Google’s search results and on other platforms for attempting to raise just this issue so as to advocate for a more nuanced approach.47 48 49
This censorship, too, had roots in WHO statements from the earliest days of the pandemic.
Already in his initial PHEIC declaration, Tedros called for “combat[ting] the spread of rumours and misinformation.”50
He would double down strongly on this rhetoric in short order, using the term “infodemic” as early as February 2020. This sort of equation of speech with disease served as a rallying cry for an unprecedented wave of censorship going forward.51
By April 2020, Youtube’s CEO Susan Wojcick announced that “Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy.”52
The WHO subsequently bragged that close to a million (850,000) videos were removed from from February 2020 to January 2021 alone as a result of WHO-crafted misinformation policy.53 (More broadly, WHO claims to work with “YouTube, Google, Facebook and several other partners” on a weekly basis to identify and target misinformation.)
Those who assume that whatever was censored must have been flagrantly wrong are mistaken.
Tech company policies included “reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that does not contain actionable misinformation.” More specifically, this consisted of “often-true content” that “can be framed as sensation, alarmist, or shocking.”54 55 56
None other than the British Medical Journal, one of the oldest and most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the world, was censored for revealing data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial.57
Even photo-sharing platform Instagram got in on the action, censoring the hashtag #naturalimmunity58. This, too, was directly reflective of WHO policy.
Reminiscent of its antics leading up to 2009 H1N1, late in 2020, the WHO would go about changing its definition of herd immunity, previously, “when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection”59 to “a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached. Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.”60
Just as absurd as changing what was supposed to be a scientific definition to one of policy-promotion was the policy itself; that of pursuing herd immunity with overtly non-sterilizing vaccines, especially given that herd immunity had never been achieved via vaccination for any cold, flu, nor analogous respiratory infection61, and certainly not for any coronavirus, for which there’d been no prior vaccine, period.62
Moreover, transmission prevention was not even tested for in the trials.63 64 65 66 As a general rule of thumb, pharmaceutical companies are unlikely to reach standards they’re not held to.
Of course, none of this mattered. The WHO knew that vaccines were the answer.
In 2020, as some governments floated the idea of immunity passports, which would affirm the status of those who had had previous infection so as to allow them greater mobility in the face of increasing restrictions, the WHO shut it down, asserting that there was not enough evidence to support a pass based on natural immunity.67 By stark contrast, that same year, the organization was already working with countries to develop digital vaccine certificates for vaccines that hadn’t even been released yet.68
The idea, spearheaded by Mr. Gates, that, “you don't have a choice… normalcy only returns when we've largely vaccinated the entire global population,” reached a sort of religious fervor amongst officials.69
Even after it became clear in the summer of 2021 from data out of countries with nearly all adults vaccinated such as Israel70 and Iceland71 72 that vaccinated herd immunity was not tenable, countries (including the US) still pushed for mandates. (Iceland, an island nation, even at its most lax, had only allowed entry with proof of vaccination or previous infection. It was as clear-cut a real-world experiment for which one could hope.)73
The CDC’s own data at the time74 showed the vaccines were not preventing against infection, something White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx later admitted she knew would be the case from the beginning.75 76
Some attempted ex post facto justifying mandates based on the idea that the unvaccinated would “overwhelm” hospitals77, but save for the elderly, who had virtually all already been vaccinated, this was largely a non-sequitur; working age people were never at a significant risk of hospitalization.
From the get-go, at his initial January 2020 PHEIC declaration, Tedros set the tone for the headlong attitude undergirding Project Warp Speed and similar programs, being one of the first to call for countries to “accelerate the development of vaccines” without issuing a world of caution about safety.78
This attitude had harrowing precedents. A CNN headline later that year criticizing then-FDA commissioner Steven Hahn blared, “Past vaccine disasters show why rushing a coronavirus vaccine now would be ‘colossally stupid’”.
Pointing out that there have been “bad outcomes” when the vaccine-making process was rushed, CNN provided a quartet of US incidents; the 1976 swine flu fiasco (which had been the last time the CDC rushed a pandemic flu shot), the Cutter incident, simian contamination in polio vaccines, as well as the anthrax vaccine that was forced upon soldiers.79 (The last time the WHO itself had rushed a pandemic vaccine was the 2009 Pandemrix disaster mentioned in a previous article.80)
Accelerated drugs are a notoriously risky enterprise in general81, and the push to get a novel nucleotide chain, genetically modified to maximize expression,8283 in a polyethylene glycol84 (petrochemical85) envelope designed to penetrate cellular membranes into billions of people is something for which the long-term ramifications remain unknown, and may never properly be, as the placebo groups were eliminated after mere months of trials.86
Moreover, such discovery is up against the notorious reluctance of regulators to implicate themselves8788 for a set of uniquely novel vaccination products that were stumped for as never before.89
The public was woefully uninformed of acute vulnerabilities such as during cell division.90 91 In fact, the notion of risks was largely a priori dismissed, as the drugs were immediately universally advertised as “safe and effective.” Dissenters found it objectionable to take a new drug mechanism with no long-term testing and summarily market it to the public as “safe”.
The pharmaceutical industrial complex whitewashed this lack of long-term testing by peddling the idea that the decades during which the products were routinely too dangerous to test on humans made them “well-researched”, thereby taking the time period during which the drugs were too hazardous for long-term data and absurdly using it as a promotional substitute for it. It was the most profoundly unscientific spin imaginable.
“[Moderna] still does not have a single drug candidate in human clinical trials.” (Fortune Magazine, 2015)92
“It never proved safe enough to test in humans” (STAT, 2017)93
Lurking in the background, the companies that stood to gain the most from the frenzy, and would do so with record-breaking profits,94 were names like Pfizer, objectively the world’s largest criminal organization (having paid the world’s largest-ever criminal fine95), Moderna, which never brought a drug to market before relieved of the burden of durational safety testing,96 and AstraZeneca, a company that got the exclusive rights to its vaccine formula from Oxford, which had initially promised to donate the rights of its coronavirus vaccine with an “open license pledge.” This was abandoned after a meeting with WHO-megafunder Bill Gates in which he self-reportedly told them, “you really need to team up.”9798
Yes indeed “we the peasant people” perhaps the meek, need strong, compassionate, honest leadership. Do we have a vax (jab) filled wth integrity for the few who govern the many (vocal majority) ?
We need to ask the WHO why they haven't investigated all the chronic health conditions so many of us have, If the EWHO gave a shit about any of us, they would be fighting GMOs, chemicals, heavy metals and more in our food supply. Big Pharma drugs kill the people that think they will help them. I used Cipro and my tendons almost burst, I could hardly walk for 3 days or move my arms, and that was ONE pill of Cipro, a drug that should be removed from the market and its among many. The WHO doesn't care about our health and they need be called out for it, as well as the NIH HHS CDC