So, clearly, there are three obvious requirements here to ensure good practice:

1. Accurate information is required, in context.
2. Those gaining financially can have no role at all in decision-making.
3. The organization tasked with coordinating any response would have to act with transparency, publicly weighing costs and benefits.

The World Health Organization (WHO), tasked by countries to help coordinate international public health, has just proclaimed Mpox (monkeypox) an international emergency. They considered an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and nearby Central African countries to be a global threat, requiring an urgent global response. In declaring its emergency, WHO stated there were 537 deaths among 15,600 suspected cases this year. In its 19^th August Emergency Meeting on Mpox, WHO clarified its figures:

…during the first six months of 2024, the 1854 confirmed cases of Mpox reported by States Parties in the WHO African Region account for 36% (1854/5199) of the cases observed worldwide.

The WHO reiterated that there had been 15,000 “clinically compatible” cases, and about 500 suspected deaths. The implications of these 500 unconfirmed deaths, equaling just 1.5% of the malaria deaths in DRC over the same period, are discussed in a previous article.

Journals such as the Lancet have dutifully towed the WHO’s ‘emergency’ line, though intriguingly noting that the mortality could be far lower if “adequate care” had been provided. Africa CDC agrees, with more than 17,000 cases (2,863 confirmed) and 517 (presumably suspected) deaths of Mpox have been reported across the continent.

Mpox is endemic to central and west Africa, being present in species of squirrels, rats, and other rodents. While it was identified in monkeys in a Danish lab in 1958 (hence the misnomer ‘monkeypox’), it has probably been around for thousands of years, causing intermittent infections in humans between whom it is spread by close physical contact.

Small outbreaks in Africa mostly went unnoticed by the rest of the world, mainly because they were (as now) small and confined. Mass Smallpox vaccination may also have suppressed numbers still further a few decades ago, as Smallpox is in the same Orthopoxvirus genus of viruses. So, we may be seeing an upward trend of this generally milder illness (fever, chills, and a vesicular rash) over recent decades since Smallpox vaccination ceased. The Smithsonian magazine put an informative summary together in 2022, after the first out-of-Africa outbreak which was spread by sexual contacts within a limited demographic group.

So, here we are in 2024, on the tail of a massively profit-driving (and impoverishing) outbreak called Covid-19 that enabled the largest transfer of wealth from the many to the few in human history. The WHO’s announcement that 5,000 (or less) suspected Mpox cases is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) allows it to fast-track vaccines through its Emergency Use Listing (EUL) program, bypassing the normal rigor required to approve such pharmaceuticals, and is suggesting Pharma start lining up.

At least one drugmaker is already discussing a supply of 10 million doses before year-end. The business case for this approach, from the corporate viewpoint, is well-proven. So are the harms in countries like DRC, as a mass vaccination program of this nature requires redirection of millions of dollars and thousands of health workers who would otherwise be addressing diseases of far larger burden.

The WHO is a large organization, and while some there have been on the hustings asking for money, others have been working hard to accurately inform the public (a core responsibility of the WHO, which retains some dedicated people). Like much of the WHO’s work in the past, this is thorough and commendable. Some of this information is summarized in the following graphics:

These charts provide data on confirmed cases, where someone with somewhat non-specific symptoms has been tested and shown to have evidence of Mpox virus in blood or secretions. Clearly, not everyone suspected can be tested, as Mpox is a very small issue for people facing civil wars, mass poverty, and vastly more dangerous diseases.

However, the WHO has absorbed a lot of money for outbreak investigation, and so have partner organizations, so we can assume there is a fairly good effort going on to detect and confirm numbers (or where has this money gone?).

In the past 2.5 years, the WHO has confirmed 223 deaths in the whole world, with just six in July 2024 (the time when the WHO Director-General warned the world of a rapidly increasing threat). Note here that 223 deaths are just 0.2% of the 102,997 confirmed cases. In Africa, just 26 deaths have been confirmed in 2024 among 3,562 cases (0.7%), spread across 5 countries (and 12 countries with cases). They are influenza-like mortality rates, not Ebola-like.

As severe cases are more likely to be tested than mild cases, the infection fatality rate may be far lower. We also don’t know (though someone does and should tell us) what the characteristics of those dying are. Most in Africa are reported to be children, so it is likely they are malnourished, otherwise immunocompromised (e.g. HIV), and have susceptibilities that could be addressed.

As is obvious from the third graphic below, nearly all the global deaths listed above were from the previous outbreak in 2022. This was a different clade (variant) and mostly occurred outside of Africa.

It is important to note a few things here. It is difficult to confirm all cases in areas with poor infrastructure and security. Mpox symptoms and signs are also frequently mild and overlap other diseases (e.g. chickenpox or even flu) so many cases may go unnoticed. Notification of results can also lag. However, the 19 confirmed DRC Mpox deaths amongst roughly 40,000 DRC malaria deaths so far this year is about 1 versus 2000. Whichever way you count it, it is not going to become much more significant. That is what the new international emergency looks like in actual data, or if you are the population of DRC at Mpox ground zero. It is likely you would not notice anything at all.

Why has the WHO declared an international emergency? Some claim it helps mobilize resources, which is a bit pathetic. Firstly, grownups should be able to discuss a situation that has persisted for two years in a rational manner and decide what might be needed, without banging a drum. Secondly, an outbreak that is killing a tiny fraction of malaria (or tuberculosis, or HIV) deaths, and far less than those currently dying in war, may not be an international emergency.

And what should be done? Diverting resources from DRC’s major priorities would undoubtedly kill far more than are currently dying from Mpox. It is quite probable that direct adverse events from vaccination alone will kill more than the 19 DRC Mpox victims confirmed this year. We likely undercount Mpox deaths, but we also undercount pharmaceutical deaths.

Perhaps a useful response would be to improve immune competence through nutrition, providing very broad benefits (but completely failing in terms of Pharma profit). Gavi’s half-billion dollars would provide vast and broad-based benefits if applied to sanitation. Perhaps limited, well-targeted vaccination may also help some communities, but there is no business case for such approaches.

What is clear, as noted above, is the following:

1. The data on Mpox, and other competing priorities, must continue to be shown in context, along with costs and opportunity costs of the response.

2. Those who will gain financially from vaccinating millions of people must not be part of the decision-making process (whether or not such a huge resource transfer can possibly be supported for such a small disease burden).

3. The WHO should continue to act with transparency, as the public has an absolute right to know what they are paying for, and the harm (and perhaps benefit) they can expect from it.

The number of Mpox deaths will rise as more are infected, and perhaps as some suspected cases are confirmed. However, we are facing a small problem in an area with far larger ones. It is posing low local risk and minimal global risk. It is not a global emergency, by any sane, rational, public health-based definition.

The rest of the world can respond by sending vaccines and lots of foreigners who need looking after, diverting local health and security personnel and almost certainly killing more DRC residents overall. Or, we can recognize a local problem, support local responses when local populations ask, and concentrate, as the WHO once did, on addressing the underlying causes of endemic disease and inequality. They are the things that make the lives of people in DRC so difficult.

About the Author

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.

While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.

Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.

The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.

Reality in DRC

The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.

During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.

The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.

An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for

For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.

Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).

While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.

Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.

The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.

Dealing with the Cause

While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.

As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.

Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.

In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.

For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.

The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.

For the average public health professional, this new world order offers better opportunities. Once confined to writing training materials for clinic staff in remote forgotten villages or chasing up diarrhea cases from a local French deli, pandemics bring excitement, make headlines and generate good financial return for the sponsors, as well as those serving them.

Generating the fear and compliance necessary to build this new and somewhat parasitic model of public health has been no mean feat. For decades, life expectancies have been rising globally while infectious disease deaths have plummeted. With modern medicine, antibiotics and the broad immunity ensured by a century of global travel and intermingling of peoples, the old cadence of regular pestilential outbreaks was broken, with nothing of real note globally since the Spanish Flu back in 1919. This is not an easy canvas to work with if the public must be convinced that things are getting worse.

Covid-19, on objective assessment, should also have provided little help, having appeared just down the road from the only high-security lab in China where the same type of bat virus was being genetically manipulated. It was an unlikely candidate to support a narrative of ever-increasing pandemic risk from a nature abused by humanity. But a subservient media dutifully got behind such a story, proving that Occam’s razor can be dulled. While Covid alone could not support a long-term industry, it has served as a wonderful platform on which to build.

A Few Seeds Can Create a Harvest

The Covid-19 response did not appear from nowhere. A public health stream concentrated on catastrophic responses to rare public health problems had been growing parallel to orthodox evidence-based approaches for a decade. From 2018 the World Health Organization (WHO), with growing private funding, was working alongside CEPI, the new international partnership to use public money to develop private sector vaccines. Prioritizing vaccine-based responses to outbreaks, the WHO developed the concept of hypothetical diseases that could then justify investments of a magnitude that real world outbreaks could not. Covid-19 served as a template to see how such responses could be globalized, irrespective of individual risk.

If risk could be disconnected from reality, then the concept of diseases being existential threats to humanity could gain greater traction. This would then justify future investment that the self-appointed saviors of humanity may require. The exponential-increase concept, mainstreamed during Covid but actually illogical for disease outbreaks in which acquired immunity mitigates further threat, could supply the urgency needed to drive funding, and bypass laborious regulatory requirements. Any delay could be argued to be making matters exponentially worse. No national leader could survive the headlines such claims would generate. The pandemic industry, based on mirages but always retaining a kernel of demonstrable threat, had an almost unassailable business model.

The kernel of demonstrable threat is the reality that diseases happen, viruses exist, and they sometimes transfer from animals to humans. HIV did, so did the Black Death (Plague) and the Spanish flu. The reality that Plague and Spanish flu killed mainly due to a lack of antibiotics, and that HIV took decades to even come to attention in a remote area before modern diagnostics and communications, are irrelevant if the media chooses them to be so.

WHO and the Cartoon Industry

The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is particularly relevant in an age when reading more than 280 characters is considered burdensome. The WHO, like other institutions trying to sell a message, understands this. The use of graphics can also simplify a message, reducing the probability that the concept being imparted is undermined by serious reflection. The recent WHO report ‘Future Surveillance for epidemic and pandemic diseases: A 2023 Perspective’ starts and ends with cartoons which read worryingly like propaganda (although the last, on page 105, seems perhaps too dystopian to sell a product). The WHO uses a graphic that superbly epitomizes the messaging behind the pandemic industry, its lack of rigor and integrity.

We could also dwell on a different one (below) from the WHO’s ‘Managing Pandemics: Key facts about major deadly diseases’. But that would be silly.

Although the intent of the WHO with this childish graphic is clear, even this is contrary to their own evidence.

The graphic of interest is used in both the Future Surveillance and Managing Pandemics reports. Two versions are provided below; the original WHO version and a modified one that perhaps it would have used if trying to impart information in context.

The WHO, in noting the outbreaks in the first version above, ignores the fact that the pathogens involved, with a few exceptions, are not new problems. They have caused outbreaks for centuries and now cause much less harm than previously before. Of the three exceptions that appear newly arisen, two killed less people in total, globally, than 8 hours of one of WHO’s former priorities, tuberculosis. The other is Covid-19, which appears likely to have resulted from a somewhat inevitable mistake of the same pandemic-industrial complex that is now seeking funding to prevent the next one. The “mistake” part is why the Obama administration paused funding for Gain-of-Function research, on the understanding that accidental releases will probably happen.

Of the pre-existing problems in the figure, influenza caused the Spanish flu in the pre-antibiotic era, killing 25 to 50 million or more in a far smaller global population, while ‘Plague’ is thought to have killed a third of Europe during the Black Death. Cholera once devastated whole regions, and Yellow Fever caused devastating outbreaks that dwarf its burden today. The rest are viruses that have probably been infecting humanity for thousands of years but never in sufficient numbers to make a significant mark (Zika was in the news in 2016 because it finally reached the Americas, not because it was new).

The lower graphic, if extended backward, would somehow need to show a rapidly decreasing disease burden as sanitation, nutrition, and healthcare has improved, and risk therefore reduced. A very different picture than the artists seemed to be trying to put across.

Unfortunately, the misrepresentation of pandemic risk is not an aberration. Over the past four years the health industry has also misled the public regarding the requirement of vaccination to achieve immunity, the advisability of throwing poor people out of work in crowded cities to stop a respiratory virus, and the necessity of preventing young girls from going to school in order to protect their grandmas when this would inevitably increase child marriage and subsequent years of nightly rape and abuse. When an industry finds that misinformation pays, and the media abrogates their role of questioning obvious conflicts of interest, the pressure for honesty and integrity declines.

So, the reader is left to decide whether the misleading impression given by the WHO is accidental or reflecting intent. It is significantly funded by private corporations and investors who benefit from mass vaccination responses of the type proposed for future pandemics. These corporations owe it to their investors to promote such responses, just as agencies such as the WHO have a responsibility to combat corporate predation in healthcare. The above misrepresentations of pandemic risk are not isolated but reflect a theme among international health agencies. Perhaps public-private partnerships, inevitably subject to human greed, must always end up exploiting rather than serving the public.

Fairy Tales, Fraud, and Public Health

Does any of this really matter? Telling stories, or ‘telling tales’, is a pastime going back tens of thousands of years. Our culture is steeped in fairy tales, and they are good for teaching children some of the fundamentals needed to get by in society – how some people can be trusted, some not, and how some even set out to harm others. It is hard, however, to see that creating fairy tales is within the WHO’s mandate. Fairy tales, clearly labeled as such, may have a limited role in public health as a tool to encourage healthy lifestyles, but never to promote fear.

Inventing stories to mislead others in order to extract wealth is also an age-old activity. It can be fairly innocuous or even positive when entertainment is involved. However, deliberately misleading people for profit, under a false pretense of helping them, is usually characterized as fraud. This would clearly be off limits for an international organization or, ethically, anyone working in public health.

Inventing a narrative to deliberately lead people, countries, and organizations down a path that will harm them would be taking this subterfuge to a whole new level. Behavioral psychology was misused to spread fear during the Covid response under the mistaken belief that this was for some ultimate good – that scaring people would somehow protect them. But using it to actively harm most people to benefit a few, when your mandate is to help the many, would be fundamentally worse.

Diverting funds from high-burden diseases to Pharma profit is actively harmful. Children die from lack of medication when supply lines are interrupted, or because their parents are simply impoverished when workplaces are closed. Abuse of girls increases when schools are closed. Malnutrition will increase when markets are closed and tourism ceased. Health services will decline when resources are diverted to a new mass vaccination program for a disease against which the recipients already have immunity. Falsifying risk and imposing a response profitable to sponsors is beyond fraud when applied to public health. It is something far more malicious.

The WHO’s constitution holds that health consists of physical, mental, and social well-being. It holds, together with basic public health ethics, that communities be provided with accurate information, in context. These communities can then make informed decisions in keeping with their own culture, beliefs, and priorities. There is no way around this without abrogating basic public health ethics and the fundamentals of human rights.

Applying these principles to the management of outbreaks and pandemics, together with the far less profitable areas of global health, would be a good basis for pandemic preparedness. This would require honesty regarding pandemic risk, and regarding the far more serious health issues that harm and kill most people. It would require health to be seen in terms of the broad areas of well-being that the WHO once prioritized. Those of us working in the field know this. It is on us to decide how we apply this knowledge, and how we prioritize the welfare of others.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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The road-building industry, working closely with government, came up with the idea of building 6-lane highways between cities. Soon the big cities were all connected, and experts from the University of Transport proved that the new highways had a 7 percent lower accident rate than normal roads. University modelers predicted that if 6-lane highways were built between every town in Fearistan, they would save thousands of lives. Experts predicted that they would even save more lives than were actually dying on the existing roads.

The country followed the experts (they were, after all, renowned for building roads) and invested in 6-lane highways everywhere. While the country exhausted itself and most people could not afford to drive their cars anymore, they were rightly grateful that the road-builders were saving them. The near empty roads were now almost completely accident-free, proving the experts right.

Eventually, the road-building industry faced a dilemma; they were running out of towns to which roads could be built. This was not what their investors needed. Then the road regulator and the road-builders met and identified an urgent need to build roads to towns that did not yet exist. Fearistan had vast areas of empty desert that were completely open to town-building. When such towns were eventually built, experts predicted an inevitable and devastating tsunami of road accidents. This would return Fearistan to the total carnage from which they had so narrowly escaped years before. The new Town-X roads (as they termed them) were brilliant examples of high-tech road construction. And everyone could see how important this work was, to keep the public safe.

In public health, we follow a similarly important business model. We call it ‘Disease-X.’

Understanding pandemic risk from infectious disease

Humans suffered for millennia from pandemics or ‘plagues.’ These killed up to a third of some populations. While causes in some cases remain unclear, such as the Athenian plague of 430 BC, the major plagues since Medieval times were mostly bacterial; particularly bubonic plague, cholera, and typhus.

Bacterial pandemics ceased in late 19^th century Europe with improved sanitation, and elsewhere after the addition of antibiotics. Most deaths from the pre-antibiotic Spanish flu outbreak in the early 20^th century are also thought to be untreated secondary bacterial pneumonia. Cholera remains an intermittent marker of extreme poverty and social disruption, whilst most deaths from malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS are associated with poverty, which restricts access to effective treatment.

When indigenous populations long separated from the bulk of humanity encountered carriers of smallpox and measles, the effects were also devastating. Having no inherited immunity, whole populations were decimated, particularly in the Americas, Pacific Islands, and Australia.

Now the world is connected, and such mass death events don’t occur. Connectedness can be a strong defense against pandemics, contrary to what Disease X proponents claim, through its role in supporting early-age immunity and frequent boosting.

These realities reflect orthodox public health but are poorly compatible with current business models. They are, therefore, increasingly ignored.

A century of safety

The past hundred years have seen two significant natural influenza pandemic events (in 1957-8 and 1968-9) and one major coronavirus outbreak (Covid-19) that appears to have arisen from gain-of-function research in a lab. The influenza outbreaks each killed less than currently die annually from tuberculosis, while the coronavirus outbreak was associated with mortality at average age above 75 years, with roughly 1.5 people per thousand dying globally.

While the media fusses about other outbreaks, they have actually been relatively small events. SARS-1 in 2003 killed about 800 people worldwide, or less than half the number of children that die every single day from malaria. MERS killed about 850 people, and the West African Ebola outbreak killed about 11,300. Context here is important; tuberculosis kills over 1.5 million people every year while malaria kills over half a million children, and over 600,000 people die of cancer each year in the United States alone. SARS-1, MERS and Ebola may gain more media coverage than tuberculosis, but this is unrelated to actual risk.

Why are we living longer?

The reason behind increasing human lifespans is frequently forgotten, or ignored. As medical students were once taught, advancements came primarily through improved sanitation, better living conditions, better nutrition, and antibiotics; the same changes responsible for the reduction in pandemics. Vaccines came after most improvement had already occurred (with a few exceptions such as smallpox).

While vaccines do remain an important addition, they are also of particular importance to pharmaceutical companies. They can be mandated, and together with the constant birth of children this provides a continuing, predictable, and profitable market. This is not an anti-vaccine statement. It is just a statement of fact. Facts are what health policy should be based on.

So, we can be confident that, barring an intentional or accidental release of a pathogen engineered by humans, it is highly unlikely that a Medieval-style outbreak will affect anyone currently living. While poverty will reduce life expectancy, it will remain relatively high in wealthier countries. However, we can also be very confident that those half-million young children will die of malaria next year and that 1.5 million people, many of them children and young adults, will die of tuberculosis.

Over 300,000 women in low-income countries will also die agonizing deaths from cervical cancer because they cannot access cheap screening. We know this, because it happens every year – it is what international public health, particularly the World Health Organization (WHO), was supposed to prioritize.

The ability to monetize an illusion

The Covid-19 response demonstrated how the sponsors of international public health institutions have found a way to monetize public health. This business model involves promoting abnormal responses to relatively normal viruses. It employs behavioral psychology and media campaigns to instill inappropriate fear into the public, then ‘locking them down’ – prison terminology before 2020. The public may then regain a degree of freedom (e.g., fly to visit a dying relative, or work) if they agree to take a vaccine, which in turn directly benefits the original sponsors of the scheme. The heavy public investment in Covid-19 mRNA vaccine development enabled pharmaceutical companies and their investors to reap unprecedented returns.

The major public-private partnership for vaccine development for pandemics, CEPI (inaugurated at the World Economic Forum in 2017), states that “The threat of Disease-X infecting the human population, and spreading quickly around the world, is greater than ever before.”

Health practitioners are quite susceptible to this propaganda (they are only human). Many also seek income from investments and patents from technologies that may help lock others down or make vaccine production quicker and cheaper. Basing their salaries and careers on loyalty to this pandemic industry, they join in vilifying and scapegoating those who speak against it. Shielded by their sponsors’ ‘greater threat than ever before’ claims, they can blind themselves to the major causes of ill health and act as if only pandemic risk matters.

Why not rely on existing threats?

Despite current efforts with yet another variant, Covid-19 is losing its ability to scare. Sustained fear is necessary for politicians in penetrated governments (as Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum notes) to provide this support. This business paradigm requires a continuing target.

The overall aim is for the public to think that only a corporate authoritarian (fascist) nanny-state can save them from a continuing threat. Major natural outbreaks being rare, and lab escapes also infrequent, Disease-X fills this need. It provides the material for the media and politicians to work with between variant or monkeypox events.

Where to from here?

For the public, diversion of resources to fairyland diseases will increase mortality by diverting funding for real threats and productive areas of investment. Of course, if increasing lab leaks of engineered pathogens are expected from ongoing and future research, that would be different. But then this would have to be explained plainly and transparently, and prevention may be more effective than a very expensive cure.

Disease-X is a business strategy, dependent on a series of fallacies, dressed up as an altruistic concern for human welfare. Embraced by powerful people, the world they move in accepts amoral practice in public health as a legitimate path to their version of success.

If our primary aim is to channel taxpayer funding to development of biotechnologies that the public can then be mandated to buy, to their own detriment but at great benefit to the developers, then Disease-X is the road forward. This market model ensures that a relative few can concentrate wealth gained from the many, at virtually no risk to themselves. The public must decide whether they want to keep their part of this highly abusive bargain.

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