It is widely known that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not cover itself in glory at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. Despite reports all over the world of the virus escaping the confines of China, it was not until mid-March 2020 that the WHO finally conceded that widespread community transmission was occurring and officially declared a pandemic.
News from Canada this past week suggests that the taxpayer-funded WHO is failing the global population once again by declaring that it will “very likely” not approve the first Canadian-produced Covid vaccine. This is based on the bizarre premise that a tobacco company owns a minority share interest in the company which manufactures the vaccine.
This is the first plant-based Covid vaccination, and has been developed by Medicago, a Quebec-based company in a joint enterprise with pharmaceutical giant Glaxo SmithKline Beecham. Canadian authorities have approved it for use but the WHO has denied emergency approval because Philip Morris International owns a 21 percent stake in Medicago.
The vaccine is manufactured in a fast-growing relative of the tobacco plant which enables doses to be produced in weeks, rather than months, as is the case with traditional methods. Furthermore, as the plants are grown in greenhouses and not a lab, the vaccines can be produced locally in low and middle-income countries instead of relying on expensive technology elsewhere.
Developing nations have been crying out for supplies of vaccinations through the Covax scheme, which is a partnership between the WHO and two international groups with the aim of providing vaccines to hundreds of millions of people inneed around the world. The good news is that Canada has more than enough for its own population. An estimated 76 million vaccines pre-purchased by Canada could be sent to poorer parts of the world where protection against Covid is extremely low. However, without WHO approval, these vaccines are not eligible for Covax, and they will therefore be denied to the developing world.
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If the WHO claims to be looking after the world’s health, it makes no sense to keep these vaccinations from the people who need it most. It seems they would prefer to see people die through lack of vaccination because of a petty and unrelated squabble with an industry.
The WHO’s true intentions about virtue signaling rather than advocating for public health go beyond this vaccine. The world’s public health organization has recently moved from tackling the harms of smoking to instead declaring that they are in a battle against “Big Tobacco.” At the 2018 WHO World Conference on Tobacco or Health (WCTOH), keynote speaker, Michael Bloomberg, an ideological anti-vaping advocate and funder of WHO reports, invoked sabre-rattling rhetoric, saying “the Tobacco Industry is trying all means to circumvent our efforts … the day tobacco no longer claims lives is the day we win the war.” The result is that now the WHO’s tobacco control arm is more interested in demonizing industry than reducing the use of combustible tobacco.
There are currently 1.1 billion smokers worldwide yet the WHO has spent much of its energy in recent years encouraging national governments to ban all safer nicotine alternatives, simply because some of them are made by the tobacco industry. It is estimated that one billion lives could be lost to smoking in the 21stcentury, 480,000 every year in the U.S. alone. But, WHO emphasis has been on cheering bans imposed on low-risk alternatives which effectively protect the incumbent cigarette trade. Such a puerile policy approach can only result in unnecessary deaths.
By comparison, global deaths from Covid currently stand at a relatively lower 6 million since the pandemic began, but the WHO is engaged with points-scoring against industry rather than saving people from dying of the disease in low- and middle-income countries. Their unethical and depraved reasoning seems to be that because cigarettes have caused so much harm, the WHO will punish industry by preventing sale of less hazardous products and declining distribution of a vaccine tangentially connected to a tobacco company, both of which will inevitably cause even more disease and death.
The WHO’s sole task is to promote effective public health policy in all regions of the world, yet it has been captured by an absurd groupthink and is wasting its taxpayer funding on trivial first world prejudices to the detriment of global health, especially in the developing world.
One must wonder at the sick mentality of WHO management and staff who believe it is a good idea to inflict untold deaths on the world’s population just to make a political point.
Martin Cullip is International Fellow at The Taxpayers Protection Alliance's Consumer Center and is based in South London, UK.
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