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January 7, 2025 - 6:40pm
Pandemic planners are, as is their wont, panicking. Specifically, they are worried that, in spite (or, indeed, because) of the Covid-19 pandemic, the global community remains as unprepared as ever for a similar event.
According to Clare Wenham, a well-known professor of global health policy at the LSE, the world “had the biggest pandemic of our lifetimes, and we’re worse prepared than we were when we went in”. One reason for this is that the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Accord talks have stalled over lower and middle income countries’ (LMICs) concerns about pathogen sharing. Given that these sorts of sharing schemes are crucial to the “preparedness” agenda, this delay has therefore brought members of the pandemic planning community to express grave concerns about its future.
While such questions of equity between the Global North and South are inevitable, it is frustrating that they continue to dominate pandemic planners’ attention at the expense of the more fundamental problems afflicting the agenda of pandemic preparedness.
As an agenda, it is a couple of decades old, dating back to the late 1990s when fears about the possibility of bioterrorism crystallised in policymakers’ minds. It is underpinned by what the medical anthropologist Andrew Lakoff describes as a vision of the “future in which outbreaks of novel diseases continually threaten human life, but catastrophe may be averted if such events are detected and contained in their earliest stages.”
For proponents of pandemic preparedness like Wenham, the threat of infectious disease with devastating epidemic potential is ever looming. In their minds this justifies, among other things, investment in expansive, real-time global disease surveillance systems (involving the pathogen-sharing mentioned above) and a relentless obsession about “the next pandemic” (note that since Covid-19, we have been treated to cycles of fear over monkeypox and now avian influenza).
This sort of monomania, however, is both irrational and pernicious. A recent analysis by academics at the University of Leeds reviews the evidence base that organisations like WHO, the World Bank, and the G20 have used to justify the preparedness agenda and finds that they systematically exaggerate the threat of outbreaks of epidemic potential. In particular, the authors find that these organisations over-estimate the historical burden of epidemic disease, and they fail to properly account for the impact that improvements in disease-surveillance technologies (such as rapid diagnostic tests) have had on our perception of the frequency of such disease events.
These distortions are not benign. For one thing, they risk drawing attention and financing away from health concerns that, despite being less theatrical, need them more. This includes things like the burden of endemic diseases like malaria and tuberculosis or the lack of access to clean water, healthy food, and staples like insulin and penicillin in many LMICs. What’s more, they may reinforce the tunnel vision that made the damaging lockdown-till-vaccine policies possible. If our pandemic planning systems are narrowly focused on infectious disease and are primed to treat every detected outbreak as the possible “next pandemic”, then we are set to be trapped in nauseating cycles of hysteria without ever getting the humane, reasonable public health responses that we need.
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SubscribeEat healthily, exercise, breathe as much fresh air as you can, take Vitamin D over the winter months and chill.
There. That’s my pandemic preparedness sorted.
The WHO had a pandemic preparedness policy worked out and published in September 2019. WHO member countries had tailored their pandemic response steps to the WHO policy paper.
Then, two things happened:
1 – The WHO changed their definition of “pandemic”; the requirement that it be a highly lethal infectious pathogen was dropped – henceforth, any highly infectious pathogen could trigger the pandemic response, even if it was not dangerous
2 – When the “pandemic” was declared, the September 2019 guidelines were ditched in globo. Measures where the September 2019 guidelines said “don’t do this, we know it doesn’t work” were brutally implemented: Lock-downs, school closures, travel bans, contact tracing, masks.
Physician, heal thyself?
(Sorry, my bad – Tedros is the first head of the WHO who is not a physician, but a public health economist. Carry on)
Tedros may be a public health official but an economist he certainly isn’t = as the economic effects of the pandemic measures adopted now increasingly demonstrate.
The only measure in your list that the WHO report on non-pharmaceutical interventions did not recommend during a pandemic was contract tracing. The others — lockdowns, school closures, travel bans, and masks — were recommended, as they were “mechanistically plausible” even though there was no scientific evidence to back them up.
Read the guidance again – the only measure with “mechanistic plausibility” was masking, They also explain that this statement represents a compromise between the Asia countries, who believe in masking, and years of peer-reviewed science, which unanimously found no effect.
On lockdowns, travel bans, etc, they said it can work if you’re a small island where you can effectively stop travel. “Work” means the measures might be able to delay infections by two weeks. Once the genie is out of the bottle, as it was when the measures were introduced, any measures are pointless.
Epidemics have always been understood as “acts of God” (in the legal sense), on a par with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami, etc. They will happen, and there is nothing man can do about it.
In 2009, John Snow on Channel 4 news led a broadcast titled, The scandal of the century. It focused on the mistaken calling of a pandemic when there was no need for it, for the mass production and purchase by governments of medications that had to be recalled. Snow interviewed a member of the Council of Europe who called for an enquiry into how big pharma had managed to wield such influence over the WHO.
What happened re that enquiry if there was one I have no idea but what is clear is that big corporations and vested interests had learned a major lesson and began investing heavily in MSM even medical journals. Come the 2020 covid pandemic absolutely no voice, no matter how qualified, was allowed to be heard without being derided and demeaned. There was massive propaganda to inspire fear. Hancocks texts were revelatory.
If we allow the same situation to prevail a second time we will be finished.
This author notably fails to mention that the one country that conceivably could have “contained” COVID 19 failed to do so and then flatly refused to allow any international inquiry into the actual origin of the virus or the early stages of its spread, information that would surely be relevant to planning for future pandemics. He also fails to mention how the same country ruthlessly pursues its own interest and ignores international and treaty obligations whenever it wants to. Why said nation hasn’t been removed from international organizations like the WHO when it has amply demonstrated its blatant disregard for the international community in multiple ways only tells me that such international organizations are basically a waste of time and money for all concerned.
On January 12th 2020, China publicly shared the genetic sequence of COVID-19 with the WHO, so that scientist world wide could begin to develop the vaccines that have saved millions of lives.
The country’s National, Provincial, City and Local governments enforced the most severe lockdowns and related measure to prevent human to human contact and infection, such that as of June 7, 2022, 28 of the 32 mega cities and provinces had fewer than 10 deaths.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1090007/china-confirmed-and-suspected-wuhan-coronavirus-cases-region/
If na wants to find some cost savings in government first step should be defunding the who and the un.
At least we are unlikely to repeat the foolishness of Gerald Ford’s presidency in the US in 1976 that vaccinated half the nation to fight the swine flu epidemic that never was. What a fiasco that was, probably one of the factors that elected Jimmy Carter.
Myself, I don’t mind a little clucking from Chicken Littles that “the pandemic is coming”. We can be better prepared, that’s for sure. But we do need to avoid as many mistakes as possible next time around. No more lockdowns. No more mandates. Inform, yes. Enforce, no.
The global health experts might want to also take a look at gain of function research. The fact (“fact” for all practical purposes) that our science overlords manufactured a virus that killed 8 million of us appears to be a nightmare that too few have the stomach to even fathom. This is a dystopian ethical horror at the level of apocalyptic fiction, yet the reality just sits there, slowly fading into history without comment or consequence.
Tommy Robinson is a litmus test for everyone in UK. Including Unherd.
Do you listen to his story? How he has been stitched up by the police, the judiciary, the security services and then sentenced by the media (including Unherd so far with their spin piece)? How he is a real time exposure of the corruption of the British State and their methods? In solitary confinement for a civil contempt of court case, politically pursued by the Attorney General, for defending the innocence of the 15 year old boy pillaried by the UK press as a Racist bullyy for defending his 9 year old sisters?
Read about all this and feel sick for your country, which politicians including Starmer, and the media, including Unherd, will do everything to ensure remains unheard.
Or
Do you just parrot the mainstream media line, just as Starmer did yesterday?
The CDC reports that only about 20% of Americans were vaccinated last year against the 2024/25 COVID variant.
With such a very low rate of vaccination, the science is very clear. There will be a massive outbreak of COVID in America.
So where is it?
Free Tommy Robinson.
with every packet of Coco-Pops.
Or do you make a joke about the shame of a country that stood back while 10,000,? 20,000 ? girls and young women were raped by Pakistani rape gangs?
You think that is funny Mike Doyle? You are a disgrace.
You make a fatuous three word interjection under an article that has absolutely no bearing on Robinson’s incarceration. You then bridle at someone making a joke about your irrelevant post. The joke provided no commented on the Pakistani rape gangs. So Doyle certainly does not merit your allegation that he was a disgrace.
Post your spam and vituperation elsewhere where they might be marginally germaine.
Why is saying ‘Free Tommy Robinson’ fatuous?
You are right this article has no bearing on him. Unherd only spins against him. I will give the other side of the story. The facts. Factuous, to you.
Do you also have a problem that in Unherd I try to correct that imbalance? Or do you only want to hear the Unherd herd hit job?
Reluctant as I am to extend this exchange that is entirely irrelevant to the article any irrelevant slogan posting is fatuous.
Unherd simply publishes articles. The authors who publish here may on the whole be a lot less sympathetic to Tommy Robinson than you or I but they don’t spin against him and you do not give the facts. If you want to give facts give them in comments under relevant articles else you appear a deranged monomaniac.
The fact is that Tommy Robinson lost a libel case and an injunction was issued against his repeating the libel. He may be perfectly right to think he was outmanoeuvred and his narrative was the truth but the fact is he lost and should have dropped the Syrian refugee issue and concentrated on publicising the rape gang trials instead of flagrantly and repeatedly breaching the Court’s injunction. Newspapers frequently have to apologise for true stories that they can’t for one reason or another prove and desist from repeating them. Tommy Robinson has brought this on himself through sheer pigheadedness.
If you read the Court’s decision any fair minded individual who is in favour of the rule of law would find it hard to disagree that his conduct required a prison sentence even if there might be room to question the length.
There has been one article on Tommy Ronbinson.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/elon-musks-criticism-of-nigel-farage-is-misguided/
I quote
“Robinson is a criminal and a grifter, winking at thuggery, who contributes very little to serious Right-wing politics in Britain. He makes a good deal of money from his travelling circus of provocation and confrontation, and achieves almost nothing of any value.”
You say this is not spin? That is nonsense. You know it.
Starmer could have said those very words.
You’re pretty useless at using searches, aren’t you.
Tommy Robinson sparks an identity crisis at Reform UK – UnHerd
There are several others concerning Robinson. If you had anything useful to contribute in Comments, you’d be granted respect; but as it stands, you’re just making a fool of yourself. If you think that’s helping anyone’s cause, you’re mistaken.
So find me an article explaining why he is in prison. From someone who doesn’t believe he should be there. As for instance Musk believes.
An article which simply states what Robinson is claiming. That goes against the herd view.
Why is there no balance?
Anyone who could write an article as to why he is prison would have to concede that the Court sentencing him had little choice but to impose a prison sentence. Read the judgement.
Of course to his extreme partisans it all seems terribly unfair but it is the inevitable result of the course Robinson has chosen to follow. Unherd do not need to search out some ill-informed contrarian to write something arguing that the Court should have said “disregarding injunctions is just fine as far as we are concerned you have our blessing to flout Court orders”.
Musk does not agree with you. He is calling for TR to be freed.
You will not hear why on Unherd.
There is no balance. Your comments which are fully aligned with the Unherd herd view, demonstrate this. You dismiss the alternative, unheard, view.
Do you understand what I am saying?
It’s sheer cowardice to attack Unherd when the main culprits for misinformation and omission are elsewhere.
I’ve shown several times now that you’ve been wrong to claim Unherd doesn’t publish certain articles, by providing links to several of them. On each occasion, you’ve failed to accept you were wrong, which is a sure sign of lack of self-awareness.
Not only is it understood what you’re saying, the limitations of the perspective from which you’re saying it is understood too. The problem is, that perspective is too narrow for you to understand what others are saying.
The article you quote simply expresses a view of Robinson that differs from yours or mine. Read the judgement of the Court that imprisoned him and let us know what legally they have got wrong. Preferably elsewhere under an article relevant to Robinson not one dealing with Public health.
Listen to what Robinson says. Start with the Jordan Peterson podcast interviews.
I listened to the Jordan Peterson podcast when it came out. You do not address the substance of the Court judgement explaining why Robinson was imprisoned. ( I presume you have not read it as you elsewhere suggested it was the Attorney General who initiated proceedings rather than the Solicitor General)
I admire the energy that Robinson has put into highlighting and opposing the Muslim grooming and rape gangs but his imprisonment is the result of a failure to accept that on a particular relatively minor issue he has lost. He should have moved on and concentrated on the major issue instead of taking steps that inevitably resulted in his imprisonment. The fact that Musk takes a different ill-informed view does not require Unherd to commission an article spouting nonsense.
To be fair Tommy probably thinks of himself more as a Quaker Man or Scott’s porage oats man than the foriegn muck of Tony the Tiger or Coco the Monkey. In truth probably more Loopy the Bee (o.k. I had to google that last one)
I hope they stat stalled forever to be honest!
Never mind pandemics what about the real threat, alien abduction