According to its mission, the World Health Organisation (WHO) should be committed to the human right to health. With the withdrawal of states from funding the organisation, it has come under the influence of private donors. These influence the WHO’s projects, including vaccination campaigns and research into new pathogens. The link between the pharmaceutical industry, food supply and digital identity is also being discussed. And now the WHO is to be given extended powers as part of an international pandemic treaty. This is meeting with resistance and constitutional complaints. KLAUS HARTMANN* scrutinises the role of the WHO under imperialist rule.
The WHO was founded in 1948 as a specialised agency of the United Nations and has 194 countries as members. It upholds the principle that health is a human right, defining health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, characterised not merely by the absence of disease or disability’.
Commendably, the WHO also fulfils a political mandate, for example by currently denouncing the scandalous consequences of the war of terror against Palestine for healthcare. The focus of its practical work is on preventing epidemics and improving hygiene conditions in underdeveloped countries.
At this point, a problem becomes acute that is rooted in the financing of the organisation: less than 20% of its budget comes from contributions from the member states, over 80% from ‘voluntary contributions’. Although some of these come from ‘interested countries’, the majority come from private sources – foundations, NGOs, pharmaceutical companies.
There was criticism of this, at least before the ‘corona campaign’, in mainstream media such as ZDF-frontal 21 (26 October 2014) or 3sat-nano (24 February 2010): Neutrality and independence are being undermined, the WHO is ‘excessively influenced by the pharmaceutical industry, in favour of its own financial interests’. ‘Big Pharma, the pharmaceutical companies, and Big Food, the food companies, unscrupulously exploited precisely this conflict of interest of the WHO,’ says Indian health expert Amit Sengupta.
The ‘donors’ do not provide the amounts to the WHO for ‘free disposal’, but primarily as so-called ‘project funding’ as part of a so-called ‘public-private partnership’. This means that they determine the aim and purpose of the projects. If you assume that a foundation gives money for charitable purposes, you are mistaken. The purpose of a foundation is always to increase the foundation’s assets.
When trying to identify the interested parties behind the WHO, one encounters an almost impenetrable undergrowth. In any case, the ‘spider in the web’ is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, worth almost 50 billion US dollars, with various offshoots. We will limit ourselves to a small selection to give you an impression of the machinery behind it:
A self-proclaimed ‘Vaccine Alliance’ (GAVI), founded at the World Economic Forum 2000, counts governments, the World Bank, UNICEF and the WHO, and of course the Gates Foundation, among its members, as well as pharmaceutical companies, and the German government also contributes several hundred million. GAVI buys and distributes vaccines on a large scale and finances scientific studies — which are used to substantiate the benefits of vaccination campaigns.
The CEPI, ‘Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations’, is another ‘public-private partnership’ of governments, the WHO, the EU Commission, research institutions, the vaccine industry and private donors such as the Gates Foundation, founded at the World Economic Forum in 2016. Among other things, it is researching ‘Disease X’, i.e. a ‘yet unknown pathogen with the potential for a new epidemic/pandemic’, in order to ensure the ‘rapid provision of vaccines against previously unknown diseases’ (!) in advance.
COVAX was founded in 2020 by the WHO together with GAVI and CEPI to accelerate ‘access to COVID-19 tools’ for the global development and distribution of ‘vaccines’.
Finally, ID2020 (Identity2020 Systems) should be mentioned – as the name suggests, they want to create ‘easy access to digital forms of identification worldwide’. Founded by Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and GAVI, governments, NGOs and foundations are also cooperating here.
Saarländischer Rundfunk gave airtime to the criticism (25 May 2020) that ID2020 aims to give every person on earth a digital identity and make the data available in a cloud. In initial trials on children in Bangladesh, they were injected with ‘markers’ via a vaccination.
It goes without saying that the Gates Foundation holds shares in the pharmaceutical multinationals Merck & Co, Glaxo SmithKline, Novartis and Pfizer/Biontech, to which it awards lucrative contracts via these and other ‘networks’ – usually at taxpayers’ expense – and then enriches its foundation assets with the corporate profits.
As part of the WHO’s One Health concept, the topics of food, medicine and health are to be merged. The Rockefeller Foundation, the American Heart Association and Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the USA, have launched the ‘Food is Medicine’ initiative, which aims to develop product recipes and medically customised meals. Together with the WHO, the World Food Organisation and the UN Environment Programme, the aim is to ‘transform the world’s food systems’.
Once the pharmaceutical industry, insurance companies and food supply are linked, a digital identity can also make it possible to steer consumption (no meat!) and control consumers.
On the website of the World Economic Forum we read: ‘Climate change poses an unprecedented threat to human health.’ (12. 09. 2023). ‘The Rockefeller Foundation and the World Health Organisation announce a partnership to expand global pandemic preparedness in times of climate change’, according to the foundation’s website (23. 05. 2023). Activist scientists are already calling on the WHO to declare the ‘climate crisis a global health emergency’. (ZDF, 26. 10. 2023). Is the ‘climate lockdown’ in preparation?
Climate change as a business idea prompted the Gates Foundation, together with the Rockefeller Foundation, to found AGRA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. This consists of the replacement of traditional farmer seeds by commercial seed companies, the displacement of nutritious varieties, yield reduction and the destruction of established smallholder structures. AGRA has links to Dow Chemical, Dupont, Cargill, Bayer, BASF and other chemical multinationals, and of course the Gates Foundation in turn holds large blocks of shares in them.
Against this backdrop, the proposal for an international pandemic treaty emerged, initially in November 2020 from the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and in February and May 2021, respectively, the EU Council and the heads of the G7 gave their blessing. In a coordinated media appeal, the EU and WHO campaigned in favour of this international agreement, which would give the WHO unique ‘emergency’ powers.
At the same time, the International Health Regulations (IHR) are to be tightened, and the chairman of the working group on reform, Dr Abdullah Assiri, let the cat out of the bag: ‘measures to restrict individual freedoms’ would have to be prioritised.
In May 2023, a majority in the Bundestag passed a resolution by the SPD, Alliance 90/The Greens and FDP in favour of the project and authorising Health Minister Lauterbach to transfer as much authority as possible to the WHO: Legislative powers to order measures in the event of a ‘health crisis’. More than 1700 people have filed constitutional complaints against a possible ratification. (FAZ, 16. 10. 2023)
The head of the Russian NBC defence forces, Igor Kirillov, has repeatedly reported findings on US research and bioweapons programmes based on discoveries in Ukrainian laboratories. These programmes involve the creation of artificial viruses with increased infection potential as well as those that have a regional or ethnically specific effect.
The next pandemic is currently being prepared in Washington. According to Kirillov, the USA wants to implement strategic plans to establish global control over the biological situation after realising that political power can be gained by creating ‘artificial crises of a biological nature’.
What role remains for the WHO under these conditions of imperialist domination?
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*) Klaus Hartmann is Chairman of the World Union of Freethinkers
