WTO: burn it to ground

In this critical pandemic, one would naturally look to the various public health organisations to understand how to react. Unfortunately, those most pertinent to your humble Devil’s whereabouts—the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Public Health England (PHE)—have signally failed to step up to the plate.

As the lock-down—and whole-scale destruction of the economy—continues in the UK, some media outlets and think-tanks have been examining just why these organisations’ responses have been so lack-lustre. And the reports are shocking—revealing not just, as one would expect from state bureaucracies, a culture of stupidity and uselessness, but very strong suggestions of corruption and mendacity that are still costing lives.

In the case of the WHO, it seems that a deference to Chinese sensitivities meant that Taiwan’s warning—delivered at the end of December—that human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (nCV) was not passed on to other countries.

Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.

Taiwan is excluded from the WHO because China, which claims it as part of its territory, demands that third countries and international bodies do not treat it in any way that resembles how independent states are treated.

Elsewhere, the WHO has been accused of being too deferential to China in its response to the virus, and a senior WHO official hung up when asked about Taiwan’s highly successful response to the outbreak.

As your humble Devil has been saying for some years, the WHO is not the same organisation that wiped out smallpox—that smallpox remains so famous as the only major disease that humanity has wiped out would be testament enough to that statement. Indeed, wiping out diseases is actually quite hard work, so perhaps we should not be surprised that this organisation has, instead, turned its attention to reducing “non-communicable diseases”—also known as “bullying people about their lifestyles”.

That the WHO has been allowed to pervert its mission so entirely that it sees rolling bad the cause of liberty as its raison d’être would be bad enough: but its entirely inadequate response to a real public health issue only confirms that this organisation needs to be entirely destroyed. Lest we forget, in January, as the coronavirus was swiftly spreading around the world, the WHO was still Tweeting about the evils of e-cigarettes.

The organisation is not fit to do the job for which it was formed: as with all bureaucracies, its only real purpose now is to perpetuate itself. It must be destroyed, its staff sacked and publicly ridiculed (accompanied by photos), and the ruins sowed with salt.

And as for Public Health England… Well, your humble Devil will opine about that organisation presently.