Rewarding The WHO For Covid Failures
This post, authored by Ramesh Thakur ,was republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic
Using figures from Our World in Data, in the 125 years since the Spanish flu, a grand total of 10-14 million people have died around the world in pandemics including Covid-19: Asian and Hong Kong flu (1957–58, 1968–69), around two million each; swine flu (2009–10), 0.1-1.9 million; seventh cholera pandemic since 1961, 0.9 million; COVID-19 (2020–24), 7.1 million.
To put this in perspective, in 2019 alone, 7.7 million people died from infectious diseases: pneumonia and other lower respiratory diseases, 2.5 million; diarrhoeal diseases, 1.5 million; tuberculosis, 1.1 million; HIV/AIDS, 800,000; malaria, 600,000; and other infectious diseases, 1.2 million. Another 40.7 million deaths were caused by non-communicable diseases. The three leading causes of deaths in the year before Covid were heart diseases (18.5 million), cancers (10 million) and chronic respiratory diseases (3.8 million).
Based on these historical data, what percentage of the world’s total health budget should be spent on pandemic preparedness, prevention and response? Would a higher percentage benefit the world’s peoples or the international health organisation that acts as the world’s “directing and coordinating authority on… pandemic prevention, preparedness and response”? Do we really need yet more national and international bureaucracy and meetings: national committees for implementing International Health Regulations (IHR) (Article 54 bis), five yearly conferences by States Parties of the World Health Assembly (Article 19.2 of the Pandemic Treaty) and engagement between the two structures?
These are the questions and considerations worth bearing in mind when discussing the newly adopted pandemic accords. Indeed, do the three years already devoted to meetings and negotiations on the pandemic accords not amount to a diversion of time, effort and resources from more urgent health priorities?
Speaking at a media briefing in Geneva on March 3rd 2020, Director-General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Covid’s case fatality rate (CFR) was 3.4%, against under 1% for seasonal flu. Addressing an internal meeting on April 7th 2025, he said: “Officially 7 million people were killed [by Covid], but we estimate the true toll to be 20 million”.
The two statements, delivered five years apart as bookends to the pandemic, amount to self-serving catastrophisation and fear-mongering. They underpin efforts to commandeer even more powers and resources for future pandemics to be declared on the sole judgment of the DG. Like New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, the WHO must be revered as the single source of pandemic truth for the whole world. The WHA met in Geneva (19–27th May) and adopted the new treaty that, although diluted from its original iteration, will still reward the WHO for its gross mismanagement of Covid by strengthening the framework for global health cooperation under its auspices.
Whoever thought it was a good idea to give any bureaucracy and its head the power to declare a pandemic emergency that will expand its reach, authority, budget and personnel and shift the balance of decision making away from states to an unelected globalist bureaucrat? Or to adopt a One Health approach when the empirical reality is of sharply differentiated health vulnerabilities and disease burdens between regions?
According to statistics reported by Our World in Data, on life years lost by people in low income countries because of premature death, disease or disability, 56% was from infectious and 35% from noncommunicable diseases. For high income countries the figures were 10% and 81%, respectively. To better capture this empirical reality of sharply differentiated health vulnerabilities, we need devolution, not more centralisation, with the principle of subsidiarity determining the distribution of authority and resources at the different levels.
WHO’s Sins of Commission and Omission During Covid
As per the WHO’s constitution, “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” In responding to a pandemic, there is a trade-off between public health, individual well-being and economic stability. It is the responsibility of health experts to focus solely on the first. Governments have the duty to balance all the competing demands and expectations and intuit the social fulcrum: the sweet spot at the intersection of dangerous complacency, alarmist panic and reasonable precautions.
In the case of COVID-19, almost all the mistakes and damage can be traced back to two extreme but mutually contradictory assumptions, neither of which was ever revised back to the mean. First, assume the absolute worst about the pandemic on infectivity, speed of progression in the infected and in rate of cross-infection, lethality and lack of treatment options. Second, assume the very best about the effectiveness of all policy interventions, regardless of existing science and data (not GIGO computer modelling) and the need for careful analyses of risk profiles by demographic cohorts and the harms-benefits equation of interventions.
The WHO should have stepped in immediately as the international institutional firewall against this. It did not. Instead its top leadership joined national health bureaucrats to insist they knew best and colluded in the takedown of dissenting voices. The consequences were catastrophic and have caused lasting damage to public health. In a recent Politico interview, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), lists the NIH and WHO as among the leading examples of the dual institutional pathology.
The WHO failed the peoples of the world in becoming a cheerleader for panicked responses instead of holding the line on existing science, knowledge and experience as summarised in its own report of September 2019. It proved too credulous of early Chinese data on risk of human-human transmission, no Wuhan lab origin, lethality and effectiveness of brutal containment measures. The first WHO panel to investigate the origins of Covid was riddled with conflicts of interest of key panel members and gave China a free pass. A follow-up investigation was stymied by China’s refusal to cooperate, for which it hasn’t been held to account.
Other WHO sins of commission included exaggerations of Covid lethality by presenting highly inflated CFR; obfuscation on the age-stratified risk profile of Covid mortality; unscientific recommendations on mask mandates and vaccine passports; and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in pursuit of the fool’s gold of Covid eradication. Sins of omission included downplaying warnings of short and long-term health, mental health, educational, economic, social and human rights harms of the drastic interventions. School closures, for example, have created a generation of pandemic children in the hundreds of millions.
Avoidable non-Covid deaths have escalated through disrupted food production and distribution globally; interrupted childhood immunisation programmes; deferred and cancelled early detection programmes and treatment of cancers; and deaths of despair among elderly people cut off from the emotional support crutches of loved family. The inflationary spirals are yet to subside from government support schemes to compensate for loss of incomes owing to economic shutdowns. The dramatic erosion of trust in public health institutions has lowered Australia’s childhood vaccination rates to alarming levels, the ABC reported on 16th May.
The WHO’s advice on Covid management also seemed to prioritise the high disease burden of industrialised over developing countries and the interests of the major global pharmaceutical companies over patients. Yet, there have been no admissions of culpability, no apologies for the extensive and lasting damage inflicted and no accountability for those responsible for unleashing and cheerleading the public policy insanity.
The US Exit Is a Wake-Up Call
Before empowering the WHO to cause even more harm, we should first investigate its Covid failings and decide if major reform can overcome the accumulated vested interests or if we need a new international health organisation. Any organisation that has been around for 80 years has either succeeded in its core mission, in which case it should be wound down out of existence, or else it has failed, in which case it should be abolished and replaced by a new one that is more fit for purpose in today’s world.
WHO confronts a $2.5 billion shortfall between 2025 and 2027. Its financial situation is not helped by President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US out. Explaining why, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on the 20th that the WHO has been corrupted by political and corporate interests and “is mired in bureaucratic bloat”. The pandemic agreement “will lock in all of the dysfunctions of the WHO pandemic response”. Other countries too should join the US to shift the focus to chronic diseases that sicken peoples and bankrupt health systems. This will better serve the needs of people instead of aiding and abetting the pharmaceutical industry’s goal of profit maximisation.
Ramesh Thakur is Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. A former UN Assistant Secretary-General, he was the principal writer of the late Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s 2002 UN reform report.
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