The WHO and EU took an extraordinary step in centralizing the protocols around pandemics, and disease in general.
June 26, 2023
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
Any policy or business that exists to fix something, relies on things being broken regularly enough to stay around.
It’s a precarious situation because of course things go wrong all the time. Cars break down. We get sick. Our vision deteriorates. Our computers crash. We need people who can help us out, and they do.
The question is how do we maintain the balance of honesty. How do we make it so it’s in their best interests to be honest?
From a strictly free market standpoint, valuing customer trust and earning their return business rather than manipulating it makes the most sense. They are sorry for your circumstances, but are grateful you chose them to help, and they honor that trust by dealing honestly with you.
Ironically, the less regulated the industry, the more likely you are to see concern for customer trust. The less regulated the industry, the more competition there is, as well. Which means rather than navigating the threat of regulators crushing your business, they are navigating the threat of losing customers to their competition.
A regulator might inspect a few times a year, but competition is always out there. A regulator could say they didn’t find your establishment to be great, but if customers are all satisfied and they rate your business well, people tend to trust the latter over the former. One need look no further than a dive restaurant with a “C” rating from the health inspector, but has a line out the door every day.
When an industry is captured by government, it gets difficult. No longer are businesses making decisions based on consumer demand, but rather they are making decisions to appease their government overseers.
People who were around for MySpace remember how fun it was to just post anything and if people liked it great. If they didn’t they didn’t.
Those same people look at the Twitter Files, in horror and despair because the idea that a social media platform would be so beholden to the government and run so counter to what people really wanted and enjoyed is upsetting.
Consumer demand factors in what people believe is best for them. Government regulation on the other hand… well… we don’t know whose interests are actually being prioritized. They say it’s “The People’s”, but which ones?
Look at how poverty has been handled by government. Of course, they purport that they are “helping the poor”. But really, if your job relies on there being poverty, are you really going to work toward eliminating it? Or are you going to simply manage it?
Look at the war on drugs. Of course, they purport they are keeping these destructive substances out of the hands of children. But really, if your job relies on stopping the drug market, are you really going to work toward eliminating it? Or are you going to simply manage it?
Look even at the corporations who are trying to get a strong ESG or DEI score so their stocks will be considered by large conglomerates like BlackRock. The whole “go woke go broke” is a fragile one because corporations are trying to balance their virtue signals for investment purposes, with their brand identity for their consumers. The misalignment between investor and consumer demands is proving to be considerable.
All this to say, motives tend to be more deleterious as policies and practices become more centrally planned.
On June 5th, a deal was struck between the WHO (World Health Organization) and the European Union. A deal with far-reaching implications. An integral layer of the WHO scheme Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN), was set:
As of Tuesday, June 5th, the Certification Network is already operational, joined by nearly 80 countries so far. However, the EU and the WHO aim to “encourage maximum global uptake and participation” in the long term, the press release states.“The WHO will continue to work with all regions to ensure that the network is accessible globally,” the WHO chief added.
Plans to add more products to this are in the works, such as global certificates for vaccination, routine immunization cards, and even international “patient summaries.” The WHO commissioned the German company Deutsche Telekom, to build them a global COVID vaccine verification app back in February 2022, which streamlines this.
In addition to the certification initiative, there is an even larger project set to be adopted next year called the “Pandemic Treaty“. This initiative has global ambitions to include a framework of binding health regulations. It would mandate all “member states to follow the WHO’s guidelines during pandemics, including quarantine measures, border closures, and vaccine requirement“.
The planned Pandemic Treaty is scheduled for approval next year, and would enable the WHO to mandate lock-downs, vaccine passports, and even crackdowns on ‘misinformation.’
This runs the risk of making the certification participation mandatory rather than voluntary for member nations.
All this is said to be in the name of “freedom” and “safety”. But anyone who understands either of those two things knows better than to think they can be centrally planned without failing miserably at both.
There’s no way any of this is in service of making people “freer”. Our default, without any of this, is freedom. This is really here to contain the non-compliant. All the advocates for this alliance are focusing on how great life will be for the compliant. There’s very little discussion of what becomes of the non-compliant.
It’s a very short distance between restriction of travel and restriction of access.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is supposedly a multinational lobbyist group whose mission is to engage “business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas“.
The WHO is an agency within the United Nations that “connects nations, partners and people to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable”. It’s a consultative institution.
We are now seeing arrangements unfold that strongly suggest that a lobbyist group and a consultative group are being repurposed as governing bodies. This should be troubling to anyone, regardless of their political stripes.
Going back to where we started: if the stated purpose of the institution is to solve for crises, then they rely on there being a regular influx of crises to justify their existence. If there is no competition, nor can there be, then the impetus behind this entire shift is worth questioning. I don’t think it’s possible to be too cynical in this case.
