WHO, a global organization at the service of the few

It is now four years since the beginning of a pandemic that took away many loved ones, acquaintances or people unknown but important to others. It generated fear, despair and poverty. I don’t know if it will happen to the reader as it did to me, that in my mind there is an empty gap of two years. I accuse, on the basis of the more than relevant circumstantial evidence, the Chinese authorities of what happened, for very irresponsible attitudes. But I also accuse the WHO, an organization that carries out …, well I don’t really know what it does beyond looking after Chinese interests. The US, the largest and most relevant scientific community in the world, is no longer there. And rightly so. In the article I explain what happened and why my opinions are so strong.

January 2, 2024Reading time: 7,10min

This is the fourth anniversary of the beginning of the worst nightmare experienced by humanity since the end of World War II. A pandemic that took millions of lives, without even an approximate number being known today. And that we will probably never know.

Allow me to take a position on the origin of the problem. At this point I have no doubt about the culprits, although neither I nor anyone else will ever be able to prove it. What happened was an accident preceded by tremendous recklessness at the Wuhan level 4 laboratory in China. Therefore, the initial culprits of the disaster have a name and a surname, the Chinese authorities.

Many years ago, so many that at that time I was still at university, they began to work with pathogens in laboratories, with the purpose of creating super-pathogens, in this case viruses, technically called “Gain-of-Function Viruses”. And not for the macabre purpose of biological warfare, but for the honorable purpose of developing super-medicines.

“The responsibility of the American and European authorities led them to prohibit long ago the work with viruses to gain function, something that the Chinese did not do”.

At a certain point, both American and European authorities realized that the tremendous risk of leakage from an accident did not justify the potential benefit, and so altering viruses in this way was banned.

But there is ample evidence that China has continued with this testing methodology.

Do not tell me that it is not suspicious that chaos is unleashed in the city where there is a level 4 laboratory (maximum level of complexity of a biological laboratory), specialized in Coronavirus. A family of viruses not characterized mainly by a pathogenicity of severity. And curiously enough, the laboratory is close to the world’s largest known reservoir of this family of viruses.

“it is clearly a coincidence, but shortly after the pandemic was declared, the Nobel Prize was awarded to the discoveries of new methods of genome editing.”

The Chinese authorities claimed as an exoneration that there were no traces of cutting and pasting (what is called “genome editing”) in the genetic material of the original virus, ignoring the world opinion that this would have been a forensically valid proof when I was doing this kind of things, in the 1980s, but that since the mid-2010s it is extremely complicated and even impossible to prove genomic editing, thanks to the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique, developed by the molecular biologists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna, Nobel laureates in chemistry, curiously in 2020, the year of the pandemic.

But this is where we get into the importance of oversight bodies, in this case the World Health Organization, WHO.

Let’s go back a bit in memory. WHO was founded in 1948 with the laudable aim of extending health care throughout the world.

After the dictator and communist, Stalin, removed the USSR from the WHO almost without having joined it, his successor Nikita Khrushchev, in the middle of the cold war, with Soviet missiles in Cuba about to unleash the biblical Armageddon, allowed scientists from both sides of the iron curtain to work together to eradicate smallpox from planet Earth.

And it succeeds. The joint efforts of Western and Russian scientists succeed. For the uninitiated I will tell you that smallpox is the only virus that man has been able to eradicate from the face of the planet.

But since that glorious moment, WHO has had an erratic evolution, where only a few directors have been able to do something significant, both for the organization and for the world. But those ups and downs turned into dark moments with the epidemic of the first SARS. A coronavirus that begins in Hong Kong.

At that time, a courageous general director, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Norwegian prime minister, took the bull by the horns and, despite Chinese opposition, declared a “global medical emergency”, the step prior to declaring a pandemic. This was a humiliation for a country that had already taken its foot off the gas in its race to become the world’s leading economic power (which it is already known that, at least in the medium term, it is not going to achieve).

“they say that revenge is taken in cold so-pa and the WHO is paying for the disaffection of its noble director general”.

This humiliation had a direct consequence for the WHO: China realized that it was an organization with an enormous reputational and global resonance, but at the same time it was an easily manipulated organization, given that it was an organization abandoned by the rich Western countries. And rightly so, by the way.

No one would accept being the one who pays for the banquet, but not being able to choose even the icing on the cake. The WHO is a body where each member country has equal voting weight. But while the first world countries provide the funds, it is the poor oneswho decides what they do. And let’s not forget that most of the latter are not characterized by widely implemented democracies. Many of them are in the hands either of dictators or of corrupt groups of influence.

And that influence of poor countries translates into anything but independence for the WHO leadership.

Today most of the programs developed by WHO are either politically focused programs or are not critical programs for global public health.

Between all the member countries, they do not raise more than 20% of the organization’s annual budget, which makes it necessary to seek money from private donors. But they require that at least a significant part of their donations be devoted to health programs in which they are interested.

As an example, the Bill Gates Foundation is the largest private donor and the second largest source of income after contributions from member countries. But the Bill Gates Foundation has demanded that the majority of its contributions be directed to polio eradication, which is why it is providing the money. The Foundation’s motives may be laudable, but if you ask the scientific community whether this should be a priority program for the WHO, most of them will tell you that it should not.

But what happens with private donors does not happen with member countries. Here the funds are allocated to what the committee, made up of representatives of 30 countries, decides and, for the most part, it makes decisions outside the opinions of the main donor countries.

And here we enter the game of favors. The poorest nations are subjugated by those that interfere significantly in other areas of their economy.

“unanimity is exemplified by the injustice of the WHO advice that calls for the adoption of a single standard that is useful or not conditioned by interests”.

If China owns almost all the public debt of Laos and Cambodia or a high percentage of South Africa, and China is interested in this or that issue, does anyone doubt the vote of any of these three countries?

The departure from the WHO of the world’s leading scientific power, the USA, or the lack of interest in the organization by other scientific powers such as the United Kingdom or France, will probably now be understood. The lack of some or the disinterest of others makes WHO a puppet in the hands of the Chinese authorities.

China realized that of the $5 billion budget (a ridiculous amount since the annual maintenance of any large hospital exceeds $600 million per year and a city like Madrid alone has an annual budget twice that of the WHO) that it had promised, $2 billion would give it absolute control of the organization and the insult, moreover more than deserved, of accusing them of being the origin of an epidemic, would not be repeated.

And so, it was said and done. When the time came to renew the General Manager, the battle was between Dr. Philippe Douste-Blazy, a French cardiologist, former Minister of Health and High Commissioner at the UN, and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian physician of dubious reputation, for having repeatedly denied several cholera epidemics in his country from the Ministry of Health of a dictator’s government. Epidemics that had been repeatedly denounced by Médecins Sans Frontières and that, according to them, Dr. Tedros threatened them that either they would fall, or he would throw them out of the country, because they were scaring away foreign investors.

“Only the city of Madrid manages twice as much budget as the WHO. With that it is impossible to do anything serious and its leaders should consider whether it is better to exist or die.”

I think the decision we all would have made is clear. The Ethiopian. There is no color. Obviously, I am being sarcastic.

Ah! Dr. Tedros made his debut with the controversial decision, to be kind, to appoint as ambassador of the organization the genocidal and dictator of Zimbabwe, Mugabe. A decision which, because of its scandalous nature, had to be reversed shortly after its execution.

Well, from that mud came that mud. The WHO blatantly covered up the arrival of COVID for the simple purpose of pleasing the Chinese government.

Moreover, the country that has best managed pan-demia, thanks to its experience with SARS, Taiwan, is vetoed by the WHO. The WHO speaks of it as a province of China and, of course, did not dare to publicly recommend its health containment policies, which in the end have been so successful that the country has only had seven deaths from this cause.

But the WHO’s ignominy did not stop there. While Dr. Fauci (one of the world’s most renowned figures in the scientific community) on January 6, 2020 gave the pertinent orders to start developing a vaccine, on January 23 the Deputy General Manager of WHO publicly admired the management of the disease by the Chinese

authorities and denied what the scientific community was demanding in unison, namely the declaration of a world medical emergency.

“while the WHO applauded China’s control of the disease, it ignored the world’s advice from the country best prepared for what was coming, Taiwan.”

But that was not all, in order to exculpate the Chinese, they attributed to them the success of the genomic coding of the virus. Well, the truth is that of course they knew about it, they were the ones who had created it. But they were not the ones who first published it, not by a long shot. It was the Australians and the English scientistswho did it and it happened between December 31, 2019 and January 6, 2020.

From this point on, any reader will understand that the first “tour” of WHO scientists to China to look for traces of the virus in the live animal market of Wuhan will end with a scandalous statement: “the virus had not been produced there and that it might have come from a batch of frozen salmon of another origin”.

Explanations that might convince ordinary mortals, but which caused hilarity among scientists.

The Chinese, in a flight forward and in one of the many stupid things they said, tried to make us see that for the first time in history the virus had jumped directly from the bat to man, without any intermediate step. Truly an unparalleled change in nature.

Meanwhile their economy suffered but grew. Ours collapsed.

The planet was so dependent on China that when our economies began to recover, there was a temporary concatenation of economic events, originating in the COVID, which caused a logistical collapse in our economies from which we have not yet fully recovered.

I do not want to end this article without mentioning a number of people. One of many to whom we owe our lives, but whose public recognition is slow in coming.

“there are two people, unknown to the general public, to whom humanity owes its recovery from the COVID pandemic, Dr. Kalicó and Dr. Fauci.”

The first and undoubtedly Dr. Fauci, vilified by The President Trump, but whose scientific knowledge and decisiveness led him to order that only six days after a Chinese scientist published a pre-paper on the strange nature of the disease being suffered in Wuhan, he ordered his team to begin development of a vaccine. A vaccine based on old technology, because it was 20 years old, but not used until then, that of modified mRNA. With this decision, he not only helped the beginning of the control of the disease but has changed the future of vaccines and other medicines. Incidentally, it was this work that gave rise to the Moderna vaccine.

The second, an unsung heroine until this year, when the Karolinska Institute was kind enough to award her the Nobel Prize. Dr. Kalicó, Hungarian by birth, who fled the abundance and freedom of communism with all her savings, which were those that went into her daughter’s teddy bear. Incidentally, she later became a double Olympic medalist with the USA, her adopted country.

Dr. Kalicó, from the University of Pennsylvania, developed the technology of modified mRNA, which, as I said before, has changed the future outlook of medicine. But she did it, not from China or Russia, but from the USA.

Now I will be accused of being pro-American or pro-European or Western. Well, I take the accusation, I am all that and I am very proud of it. I am convinced that the great scientific advances have come from the hand of these and that either the WHO changes or world health will never cease to be in the hands of a servile and politicized organization of scientific irrelevance.