Replying “Elusive UN pandemic treaty points to dangerous Covid amnesia” By David Dodwell
After bungling the H1N1 pandemic and the Ebola outbreak, the WHO bungled its handling of Covid.
Yet David Dodwell says “let’s give it more power, more money!”
WHO’s bungling includes: delayed announcements of a pandemic; of Covid transmitted human-to-human; of travel restrictions. No questioning its origin. Pandering to “how well” China was doing. Shifting advice on masking.
The National Library of Medicine excoriated the WHO in October 2017 for its earlier blunders. The word “mistake” appears 22 times in the paper. While the WHO reviewed each outbreak to fix the mistakes, little improved. It continued to “accept member states’ unverified claims as to how well [an] outbreak was contained”. It “actively resisted attempts to declare … a public health emergency…”.
This is made worse by the WHO’s “standard slow and methodical work”.
To this dilatory, this mistake-prone outfit Dodwell would give “more powers … for an overseeing specialist body with the authority to crack the whip to ensure cooperation and compliance”.
The WHO already has an “overseeing specialist body”, the World Health Emergency Programme, to “crack the whip". But good luck finding what it’s achieved — it is best noted for its invisibility.
Dodwell’s pandemic approach is “socialist”: everything planned and coordinated from a centre somewhere in the comfort of, say, Geneva. The “capitalists”, like myself, believe the “market” of different approaches will solve things better.
This worked in the United States. Every state had its own approach. We are now able to conclude how each worked and to advise on the best approach for the next pandemic. This is using the “Science”, that Dodwell is so quick to urge, but then to promptly ignore -- as he does on the question of masks, where the Cochrane Report has comprehensively proven that they offer little protection.
Dodwell is given to feel-good sayings like: “Management of a global health crisis can only be as strong as the world’s weakest healthcare systems”. This is clearly nonsense. We enjoy our very good health system here in HK, even as Somalians sadly suffer from the lack of theirs.
He says: “None of us are safe unless all of us are safe”. Patent nonsense. I’m safe here in Discovery Bay, even as those same Somalians, sadly, are not. Why do people parrot nonsense like this? It’s lazy thinking.
Thus I don’t share Dodwell’s “anxiety that the World Health Assembly will be unable to deliver”.
For me, that’s a relief! A supra-national whip-cracking bureaucratic behemoth will not be telling me to “Comply peasant! Tremble and Obey!”
Peter Forsythe
