Dr. David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
Topic: Amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations: An Attempt to Implement an Existential Change in Sovereign Rights and International Relations.
Dr. David Bell’s presentation at a SVPTF webinar, Every Breath You Take: Big Brother’s Plan to Stalk You through the WHO, on Feb. 27, 2023
THANSCRIPT
Dr. David Bell: [00:00:00] People need to understand the background for what is going on and the current amendments to international health regulations, the treaty as it is called, or instrument that is going alongside that the WTO developing, are the result of a few decades of big changes in the global health. So the World Health Organisation was set up originally after the Second World War as a country based organization. There is a lot of emphasis on decolonization and removal [00:00:30] of central authority, an emphasis on communities coming out of the colonialist eras of the 1930s and fascism, etc. And the WTO was one of many organizations that was set up to try to stop that happening again. So that ran pretty much in that way for a long time. It was almost solely funded by countries. Countries have a say in what happens. This has changed over the last couple of decades in two ways. One, the there’s been an increase in private funding, corporate and [00:01:00] private individuals. And these have now become one of the biggest funders of W.H.O.. And secondly, the funding is very much directed. So rather than core funding, the funders decide what their funding will be used for. So essentially what they will do so that this is it’s fair to movement from disease, burden based emphasis of the World Health Organization to an emphasis on profit. So there are two instruments here the international health regulations and this court, the treaty [00:01:30] or that is the C plus, and it’s recently retracted.
Dr. David Bell: [00:01:34] And they do slightly different things, but they complement each other. So the international health regulations have been around for 20 years. They have also been under international law, but they are considered to be recommendations of the W.H.O.. And what the amendments will do in their current form, and it will go through a few more committee meetings before May this year when they voted on both countries. These [00:02:00] amendments greatly expand the definition of health emergencies, including a sort of one health definition, which includes anything that could potentially impact well-being or health. And it includes potential threats rather than real threats. And as a bureaucracy, a bureaucracy of surveillance has been set up. We will find many potential threats. The DG, the director general of HR, an individual, will have sole power to declare an emergency and to stop an emergency [00:02:30] later. And the other important thing is that the amendments in their current form change recommendation to be binding. So when countries sign this, if the wording is not changed, they will be signing up to a binding agreement to do what the W.H.O. does in any health threat. Another important aspect of this is the way it addresses human rights and the original language of the international health regulations from 20 years ago or so. Includes very similar language [00:03:00] to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the Second World War.
Dr. David Bell: [00:03:03] This is being changed to equity coherence and inclusivity, which are really meaningless terms. And importantly, it also is basing these on the social and economic context. So this is taking the whole basis of individual sovereignty, sovereignty and all people equal. And turning this into all people are not equal, but someone who decides, based on the economic and social assessment of that person, will decide [00:03:30] what rights they have. And these rights are very, very powerful. The international health regulations at the moment include recommendations from the W.H.O. and the DG to do things like closing borders, forced quarantine, confinement of individuals, forced medical examinations, requiring injection, etc. But in changing these from recommendations to a binding agreement, what [00:04:00] this means is that W.H.O. can tell a person in United States or Malawi or Vietnam to be injected with a vaccine, for instance, or to have a medical examination or to be confined at home. And rather than having someone given in the country to do this or in the local community assessing public health risks, this is someone in a completely different part of the world giving broad. Orders on how people should be treated. So this is [00:04:30] completely undoing the whole idea of individual sovereignty and community based care that was based on. So the treaty mechanism, which will be voted on next year and this is what the I and B Committee is looking at is in some ways a softer in the wording because it seems to assume that the amendments to the IRA will get through.
Dr. David Bell: [00:04:52] So the treaty essentially provides money. It talks about 5% at least of. Health of health budgets going to emergencies. [00:05:00] It sets up a mechanism for supply the WTO will control and a global governing board for the treaty and for this whole pandemic or emergency preparedness agenda which will be within WTO. It appears so it’s really putting the bureaucracy there to support the changes, quite egregious changes that are proposed in the international health regulations. So we need to stop both of these. They are both a vast overreach [00:05:30] in terms of public health, as we’ve seen from COVID and the COVID response, which these are planning to, you know, very clearly will replicate and intensify. They are bad for public health. They impoverish people. There’s a vast increase in other infectious diseases, in malnutrition, etc., directly as a result of what has been done. And it was all predictable. So and what the concentration of this has been in very much to the very people who are promoting this agenda and who have been increasingly [00:06:00] funding W.H.O., it’s really it’s using taxpayer’s money to concentrate wealth, to impoverish the majority, to reduce health and to concentrate the wealth in the hands of these sponsors.
Dr. David Bell: [00:06:13] I think we do need some sort of international health mechanism. We need coordination between countries. We need a network that will support countries when they need it and when they ask for it and when communities ask for it. But this is going very much in the opposite direction. This is a danger to health, [00:06:30] is a danger to the individual sovereignty and national sovereignty. It’s also it’s just unravelling the whole decolonization and the strength of the human rights agenda that we’ve developed over really 100 years. So how do we combat this? Firstly, we need people to understand what is there, and we need the general public to understand and we need legislators to understand. And not just in the United States. We need this globally. This affects all countries and what [00:07:00] it is. When we damage other countries, we damage humanity, but we also damage the United States. So this is a fundamentally different approach to human rights. People need to understand that. They need to understand that this is unravelling what was fought for in the Second World War, in other wars in this country, the fight against slavery, the fight against discrimination, etc. This is unravelling the whole concepts that drove those. So people need to understand this. They need to put pressure on legislators, and legislators [00:07:30] need to stop this from happening.
Dr. David Bell: [00:07:32] There’s different ways of doing that. But non-compliance, once it’s in place is going to be very difficult. So the W.H.O. even needs to know that this is completely unacceptable. And the countries that are pushing this and the people that are pushing this need to know that completely unacceptable. It has to be completely withdrawn or we need to start paying attention to these institutions that are doing this, including the W.H.O., etc.. So that could mean in the end, the W.H.O. needs funding [00:08:00] from countries. It doesn’t make sense to fund something that is a net harm. In that case, we would need to completely replace it with an organization that is completely different, that doesn’t have conflicts of interest, that responds to people and not for profit. There are different ways that legislators can deal with this, but they need to feel the pressure from the people to stop this. We really need to stop the governments from going through that. They very likely will, at least in a different form than now, because nobody needs a 50% vote. The second part [00:08:30] needs a two thirds vote of the World Health Organization because it’s a new treaty. But in either case, if they do go through, they need to be completely undone. And this and other countries need to make it very clear that they’re not going to comply with any of the provisions.