In a short video posted this month, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tells us what we must do to deal with the Chinese coronavirus.
What he actually reveals is the pathology afflicting the World Health Organization and our own body politic.
Here’s the not-so-good advice the not-a-medical-doctor offers:
There will be no return to the “old normal” for the foreseeable future. But there is a roadmap to a situation where we can control the disease and get on with our lives.
But this is going to require three things.
First, a focus on reducing mortality and suppressing transmission. Second, an empowered engaged community that takes individual behavior measures in the interest of each other.
And third, we need strong government leadership and coordinated comprehensive strategies that are communicated clearly and consistently. It can be done. It must be done.
I have said it before and I will keep saying it. We weren’t prepared collectively. But we must use all the tools we have collectively to bring this pandemic under control. And we need to do it right now.
Together we must accelerate the science as quickly as possible, find joint solutions to COVID-19 and through solidarity build a cohesive global response. Science, solutions, and solidarity.
Let’s unpack.
The first questions a reasonable person would ask are: “Who is this guy?” and “Why should we listen to him?”
Tedros is not a medical doctor (unlike all the previous WHO directors-general). He is a politician from an underdeveloped country, a member of the Maoist Tigray People’s Liberation Front who has been credibly accused of covering up multiple cholera outbreaks as health minister of Ethiopia.
This résumé exemplifies how WHO has become primarily a political rather than a health organization. Tedros was not selected for the position by doctors. He was “elected” by a majority of the WHO member states. Many of these countries are corrupt autocracies you wouldn’t visit even with medevac insurance.
The “election” process gives Niue (population 1,612) an equal vote with the United States (population 330 million). But that’s not the real problem. Rather than an election as Americans understand the term, it is a Persian bazaar where votes are sold to the highest bidder without even a pretext of honesty, integrity, or good faith. Tedros had the highest bidder of them all on his side, the Chinese Communist Party.
For further evidence of the political nature of this “health” agency, consider what CCP-loving New York Times health reporter Don McNeill revealed about the priorities of Maoist apparatchik Tedros:
He promised as the head of W.H.O. to pursue health insurance in even the poorest nations, strengthen emergency responses and make the agency more accountable and transparent.
He backs greater access to birth control and preventive care for women and is committed to having more gender and ethnic diversity in the agency. He also has promised to fight the health effects of climate change.
Universal health insurance, birth control, diversity, climate change—the priorities of the elites in the Gates Foundation and wealthy donor nations the WHO hits up for money.
Tedros brought more diversity by appointing the mad butcher of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, as special WHO ambassador. But the China virus exposed just how miserably he failed on emergency response, transparency, and accountability.
Like any good politician, Tedros cloaks his intentions with an impermeable layer of meaningless words.
Rather than a cure, the spin-doctor offers a “roadmap to a situation.” Is the “situation” an automobile accident this roadmap will take us to? The situation is more like a house, where we can “get on with our lives.” It’s like those roadside signs that advertise “if you lived here you’d be home now.” Tedros butchers clear language as effectively as Mugabe butchered his opponents.
But wait—to get this roadmap we must become “an empowered engaged community that takes individual behavior measures in the interest of each other.”
This jargon is entirely in line with Marxist philosophy and lingo. And so are the fake doctor’s other prescriptions—“strong government leadership,” “coordinated comprehensive strategies” (centralization) and “solidarity.”
He doesn’t tell us to what “coordinated comprehensive strategies” and “cohesive global response” the road map leads. We’re just supposed to nod along approvingly, in solidarity, because it all sounds so impressive, so “sciencey” or something.
Closer examination reveals “a cohesive global response” could mean anything, and therefore nothing. A program of national self-reliance for pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, dispersing production of these essential goods among as many countries as possible, would be “a cohesive global response.” Considering Tedros’ background and chief patron, it’s a safe bet that is not the global response he has in mind.
So the key question: Why do we listen to him?
He’s not a doctor. You wouldn’t trust him to check a sore throat but yet we’re supposed to trust him with the health of the world?
He’s a third-rate politician from a fifth-rate country who was never elected to anything by Americans, and he doesn’t answer to anyone who was. That’s not even how things work in Peoria, but we’ll turn our entire country over to him?
There was time, not very long ago, no self-respecting red-blooded American would accept the word of an unelected, unknown nobody from a corrupt country you’d never want to live in.
Now our elites shower him with praise and money. They hang on his every word as received wisdom. Big Tech oligarchs give him veto power over the information Americans can read and hear.
That so many people now unquestioningly take advice from this empty suit shows how far down the rabbit hole of globalist technocracy we’ve gone.
The problem is not simply that we have surrendered power to unelected bureaucrats in faraway places.
The problem is how thoroughly we’ve been trained to accept expert authorities, whoever they are. Give someone a title, a credential, an advanced degree and we automatically accept they know best.
We have surrendered faith in our ability to make decisions for ourselves—to think for ourselves.
Such faith is the foundation for self-government on the personal and the community level.
It’s what confers immunity against infection by authoritarianism.
This little man from nowhere has nothing to tell us about the China virus. He has a lot to tell us about how our body politic is ailing from a weakened immune system.
That’s a disease the WHO won’t cure. As Tedros shows in his video, he’d rather not.