ANALYSIS: Global Rule by Experts is a Reality and a Risk to Self-Government

By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | May 26, 2022

GENEVA, May 27 (C-Fam) The World Health Assembly has voted to give the World Health Organization significantly more money from member states. However, the body is still negotiating whether to give more powers to the agency’s experts in health emergencies.

The World Health Assembly adopted a budget decision earlier this week to increase “assessed” contributions to 50% of the organization’s roughly $5 billion annual budget, compared to less than 20% currently. But in a defeat for the Biden administration, countries are expected to postpone the consideration of U.S. amendments to the international health protocols for pandemics tomorrow at the World Health Assembly.

The changes to the International Health Regulations would give World Health Organization officials more powers in future pandemics, powers they would use to interfere in domestic politics on abortion and other hot-button issues.

The U.S. amendments are supported by the European Union and other western donors but met some resistance from African countries, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Iran among others. Governments asked for more time to consider the amendments plus open and transparent negotiations to discuss them more fully.

The changes to the budget were presented as a measure to reduce the influence of donors who earmark funds for specific projects. Bill Gates, the second largest single donor to the WHO, funds over 10% of the health agency’s budget annually at nearly $800 million. Only Germany gives more money to the global health agency. But the overall effect of increasing the regular budget will be to increase the funding and influence of the organization, without adding any transparency or reducing the impact of earmarked funds. In the long term, it may even indirectly boost Bill Gates’ influence, something that does not bode well for self-government.

In his latest book, Bill Gates describes a “team” of global health officials that can quietly quash a pandemic within hours of the outbreak. Gates imagines 3,000 officials and scientists with a $1 billion budget and the power to “declare a pandemic.”

Such a declaration would allow the experts to take control of the world’s governments, stop global travel, block all economic and social activity, and curtail civil liberties. After disrupting great part of the world’s political and economic structures the experts would oversee the rebuilding of a healthier, greener and more LGBT-friendly world through vaccine and diversity mandates and rake in billions in the process.

The irony is that this vision of global rule by experts is already in great part a reality, thanks to Bill Gates’ and Western governments’ heavy hand in global health governance. During the COVID-19 pandemic governments around the world were at the mercy of international health experts. Self-government was undermined as a result.

Rather than take responsibility for national health policies and suffer the political fallout of their decisions, nations fell in-line with the daily bulletins and press briefings of the World Health Organization. For their part, the risk-averse health experts crafted ever more draconian recommendations based on limited or inaccurate information, including unprecedented mandates of experimental vaccines. It took several weeks, for even the bravest of U.S. Governors to break with these edicts.

Small businesses around the world went bust. Entire political classes were economically wiped out. Technology giants like Amazon tripled in size. According to the best-selling book The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert F. Kennedy, billionaires increased their personal wealth exponentially during the pandemic. Bill Gates himself made $22 billion, according to Kennedy, including through investments in Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies who contributed to COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution.

This is not to say that COVID-19 was planned. Nor is it to say that international cooperation is not needed to address pandemics. It is to say that international health experts already have incredible powers, that players like Bill Gates contribute greatly to those powers and how global bodies make decisions, and that they do so without any real transparency.

C-Fam intern Victoria Gonzalez contributed to this Friday Fax from Geneva

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