“Keep Paying Us”/The Lancet
WHO Collaborative Center officials demand more money
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01174-2/fulltext
Working with member states, WHO has led the eradication of smallpox and contributed to drastic reductions in other major public health threats.
Yes, WHO supervised the successful smallpox eradication campaign, but that ended 48 years ago. Not a single person from those days remains at WHO.
The belief that decreasing public health budgets in this way can lead to cost saving is immoral and misguided.
Straw man argument: who has used overall cost savings as justification for the cuts? I have not heard that.
A World Bank analysis found that investing in pandemic preparedness alone can yield a return of up to 88% annually through avoided economic damage.5
This is an example of how these multilateral institutions that work hand in glove can publish any drivel to support each other. The Pandemic Fund (seeking billions from nations to use for pandemic planning, whatever that actually is) is jointly managed by the WHO and World Bank.
Public health concerns demand coordinated national and international responses. The COVID-19 pandemic and large-scale outbreaks of Ebola virus and mpox highlight that health security is a collective responsibility. Any threat to collective global action, sustained investment in health, and strong technical leadership risks allowing local health problems to escalate into global crises.
Note how the authors cite no examples, because there aren’t any.
This is the assertion that justified locking down the planet for a not-so-terrible disease. It is the “public health” justification for global control of emergencies. What did lockdowns do? Postponed the reckoning. New Zealand, applying the harshest measures and having closed its borders for what seemed like forever, eventually had similar case and death rates as everywhere else, only much later. And after nearly everyone was vaccinated.
We must never cede control of borders, quarantines and the picking of economic winners and losers to some unaccountable global agency.
As current directors, past directors, and members of WHO Collaborating Centres, we fully support WHO in carrying out the constitutional mandate, and call on everyone—including member states, donors, partners, and other stakeholders—to continue investing in WHO to promote health and safety while helping vulnerable populations worldwide.
The authors are trying to fool us here, as if supporting the WHO is our constitutional duty. No, they actually refer to WHO’s own constitution, replacing the appropriate word “its” with “the.” And in case we had any doubts, WHO policy during COVID newly impoverished at least 250 million workers who were told to stop working, go home and lock down, especially in South Asia. With no WHO safety net.
Save the crocodile tears. In case you have not figured it out by now, the “health emergency preparedness and response [and] public health surveillance” areas where funding has been cut were not about pubic health at all. They were about funding a rapacious industry that makes pandemics more likely, and surveilling the global population of humans and animals. We don’t need or want either one. Find something useful to do with your degrees.