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A friend sent me an article today about how the [WHO was captured.](https://unherd.com/2023/03/how-the-who-was-captured/) It is an interesting read. This was because I had sent an article to him about the excess mortality rate in Australia, which in 2022 was 12% higher than normal - and it largely wasn't Covid that has caused it. Heart disease jumped 17% - which is an *incredible* change.

![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/tarazkp/23tGRVNVgNuqevtXhJT1DeCE68orvj8wH88NHCsNPJRz3o2Qk1ihTjTVh89hrpPyzxLem.png)

However, Covid aside, what makes the article so interesting a read is because the "capturing" of the WHO, was driven by a change in funding. Rather than getting public funds from the United Nation countries, it ended up being sponsored funds, from people like Bill Gates (10% of all WHO funding) and Big Pharma companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline and Novartis.

>What could possibly go wrong?

You can read the article for more, but what stood out to me was how the financial incentive drives the development process and of course, even though donors might have competing interests, they tend to end up aligning, which is what centralizes the decision making process and empowers an authority that will maximize itself, over the interests of others. And the other thing that stood out was that this really started back when Ronald Reagan was the president in the US, in the early 1980s. 

And it is this that I mentioned to my friend, because in a world of instant gratification and a lack of long-term planning and investment into even our own futures, what chance do we have to organize ourselves against this kind of continually centralizing threat that is willing and able to make moves that will see results decades into the future. Even if the individuals making the moves aren't necessarily looking that far down the track for themselves, the interests they represent stretch across generations and the companies for example, will benefit for as long as the companies exist, never having to worry about their own mortality, just the bottomline. There are a lot of points that could be mentioned from the article, yet it just reminded me how good organizations can go bad, once they have the wrong incentives. 

For example, during the Covid pandemic, the eradication of Smallpox was often cited as a reason to listen to the WHO and on the value of vaccination. However, the eradication was declared in 1980, a couple years before funding was pulled and the WHO started to effectively privatize around companies that were interested in pushing in more particular directions than when the WHO was created after World War II, where - 

>as an agency of the United Nations, it had the aim of promoting “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health” across the globe — whereby health was understood, crucially, as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. It was, in other words, predicated on an understanding of the fact that economic and social development are fundamental determinants of health —  a concept that would be reaffirmed in the Declaration of Alma-Ata of 1978. [](https://unherd.com/2023/03/how-the-who-was-captured/)

As they say, *health is wealth* - and there is plenty of wealth being generated from our health, or lack thereof as the case may be. And, now the WHO is looking to extend their powers even further, changing their recommendations to members from *non-binding* to "binding" and getting them to "follow", rather than *consider. With several other key changes being pushed with the intention to apply at a global level, even though there is no public discourse on this. 

>It is just being accepted.

>As a reaction to the brutality of 20th-century totalitarian and colonial regimes — both of which had involved horrendous cases of medical abuse — the WHO also emphasised the importance of democratising medicine by putting communities and individuals in charge of their health through the promotion of proximity and primary healthcare.

At the WHO, like in all places, *democracy is dead.*

Long live democracy? 

Well, while it might be the best in use, it is obviously not infallible and definitely not immune to being commandeered and used for nefarious activity. And, once that starts to happen, "democracy" start to become more centralized - *authoritarian.* Our best interests are not in the interest of the authority, they are just points to apply pressure to to gain more power and control, to wind back freedoms. 

It sounds like a conspiracy, but it isn't necessarily in the sense that most think about conspiracies, because it is the market forces in action. We are driven by incentives and these will align given time, whether they are for our wellbeing or not. The shorter sighted the incentive model is, the faster it will lead us down a path to ill-health, in the same way that the pleasure of eating chocolate can lead to us becoming obese, or sitting on the enjoyment of sitting watching TV can cause our bodies to degrade and atrophy. 

Our lack of foresight means that we are aligning ourselves with a future that we don't want if we could see the outcome of our actions, yet daily, we keep making decisions that take us to exactly that point. And, there are others that are incentivized to keep leading us down that path, because it is in their self interest to have us reliant on them, because that is their business model, their desire.

As the quote from Buddha goes, 

>the root of all suffering is desire.

And we are setting ourselves up for a world of suffering.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]



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