WHO Cares?

The World Health Organization cares more about its own life than the lives of the poor.

Brian Doherty from the January 2002 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Nothing condemns WHO's current agenda more than some of its own pronouncements. In a 1999 press release, WHO declared that six illnesses accounted for 90 percent of all infectious disease deaths among people under 44 years: malaria, tuberculosis, measles, diarrheal diseases, acute respiratory infections (including pneumonia), and AIDS. The same press release declared that "the tools to prevent deaths from each of these six diseases now cost under $20 per person at risk, and in most cases under $0.35. Yet these diseases still caused over 11 million deaths in 1998."

Leaving aside the questionable belief that existing AIDS therapies, still mired in uncertainty, are reliable "tools to prevent death," we have WHO declaring that 11 million deaths -- 90 percent of all infectious disease deaths for people under 44 years -- could have been easily prevented with an expenditure of, at its lowest, $3.9 million, and at its highest, $220 million. That is, anywhere from 0.4 percent to 20 percent of WHO's budget for one year.

Wagner and Tollison's analysis of WHO's budget in the mid-'90s found the group's spending heavily weighted toward conferences and headquarters expenses and away from actual on-the-ground aid in disease-fighting. They noted 70 percent of the budget then went to administrative overhead and the Geneva headquarters. In 1995, Tollison observed on British TV that "the World Health Organization is famous for its conferences, but I think that any ordinary person complying with a decision to spend on those conferences or to spend on senior executives in Geneva versus looking at real public health problems in the field, where little children are dying for want of a shot, I don't think anybody would make any other decision than to say, get the resources out of Geneva, quit having the conferences. Inoculate those children."

But as Paul Dietrich first began to realize over 15 years ago in the hot Mozambique sun, buckle-up billboards -- along with phantom studies on second-hand smoke and warnings about driving while talking on cell phones -- are higher priorities to the public-health mandarins in Geneva. In pursuit of perpetual bureaucratic life, WHO has changed its mission from eradicating disease to a lunatic bid for never-ending social control. In a strange way, in extending its own life, WHO has rendered itself moribund.